I wasn’t able to attend or contribute to the Collaborative Information Behavior (CIB) workshop held recently in conjunction with the GROUP 2009 conference, and was looking forward to reading about the discussion, which was posted today by Sharoda Paul. The discussion touched on several interesting points, and perhaps we can get some of the participants to comment more on them (here or elsewhere). The notes highlight discussion around models, behavior vs. technical design, appropriate research methods, explicit vs. implicit collaboration (yeah!), and evaluation.
I am particularly interested in the discussion around reusing existing technology vs. creating new tools to support collaboration. This topic comes up often in CSCW literature, and it would be interesting to understand whether CIB applications differ from other tools such as collaborative drawing or editing applications in this respect.
Another huge challenge is evaluation: CIB is manifested by groups of people engaged in intensive cognitive activity, the outcome of which is difficult to caputre in a laboratory setting. But while observations of actual work practice are extremely useful in informing design, are observation and attendant description the only tools we have for assessing the impact of collaboration on information seeking? So far, papers that described evaluation of collaborative information seeking have focused either on simulation or on qualitative descriptions of behavior. Are there metrics that can be applied to quantify the effects of collaboration?
This workshop seems to be a nice continuation of the workshop we organized at JCDL 2008, which also touched on some of these topics. Perhaps it’s time to start planning the next one.