The Psychology of Collaboration. In the 1980s, long before the rise of online social networks, Irene Greif helped found the field of computer-supported coöperative work (CSCW), which explores how technology helps people collaborate. Today Greif is an IBM fellow, the company’s highest technical honor, and director of collaborative user experience in IBM Research. Jodi Slater, who worked with Greif at Lotus Development after it was bought by IBM in the 1990s and later cofounded the business consultancy MarketspaceNext, recently spoke with Greif for Technology Review about why some of the hardest collaboration problems have nothing to do with technology.
TR: How are today’s technologies that help employees collaborate different from those that existed before, such as Lotus Notes? Greif: What got researchers interested in starting this field [CSCW] was that anthropologists went into offices and started seeing the kinds of things that break when you automate too much. How has this played out in IBM? The Psychology of Collaboration - Dr Irene Greif for Technology Review. As part of their series on collaboration, Jodi from Technology Review interviewed Irene Greif at IBM about the psychology of collaboration. The focus of the interview was about the non-technology aspects of collaboration, and they discussed: - Too much automation leads to process breakdowns. The system can't see what people can see. - More informal interaction in the office is now online, meaning that combining informal and formal things may be more possible. - Knowledge management failed; social software does knowledge management as part of work. - Dogear gave better search results on the IBM intranet than intranet search. - Why collaboration requires the sharing of pre-finished thinking and artifacts.
The most interesting comment to me from Irene was this: "Jodi: What qualities will make or break the next big thing in collaboration? Irene: I think it is not about the technology per se, but more about finding technologies that are resilient against controls [by management]. 2. 3. 4. 5. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework - 1962 (AUGMENT,3906,) A few words on Doug Engelbart. Bret Victor / July 3, 2013 Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain. Technology writers, in particular, tend to miss the point miserably, because they see everything as a technology problem.
Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem, with technology falling out as part of a solution. When I read tech writers' interviews with Engelbart, I imagine these writers interviewing George Orwell, asking in-depth probing questions about his typewriter. Here's the most facile interpretation of Engelbart, splendidly exhibited by this New York Times headline: Douglas C.
This is as if you found the person who invented writing, and credited them for inventing the pencil. Then there's the shopping list interpretation: His system, called NLS, showed actual instances of, or precursors to, hypertext, shared screen collaboration, multiple windows, on-screen video teleconferencing, and the mouse as an input device. These are not true statements. Douglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution. Doug Engelbart knew that his obituaries would laud him as “Inventor of the Mouse.” I can see him smiling wistfully, ironically, at the thought. The mouse was such a small part of what Engelbart invented. We now live in a world where people edit text on screens, command computers by pointing and clicking, communicate via audio-video and screen-sharing, and use hyperlinks to navigate through knowledge—all ideas that Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) invented in the 1960s. But Engelbart never got support for the larger part of what he wanted to build, even decades later when he finally got recognition for his achievements.
To Engelbart, computers, interfaces, and networks were means to a more important end—amplifying human intelligence to help us survive in the world we’ve created. That inspired Engelbart, a young electrical engineer, to come up with the idea of people using screens and computers to collaboratively solve problems.