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Interviewer: Phong and Scotty
Interviewed: Hal E., 3/30/05
1. talked to Hal as both an individual user and as observers of users. However Hal hasn't observed that any live PitAboard experience.
2. Hal's own personal experience:
- most usage of wiki composed of folks with computer science background. these folks have enough expertise that the wiki is limiting them (markup not expressive enough); they feel that they can do so much in the editing mode and have to get out of it;
- whereas folks with little technical experience feel that the editing mode is enabling for these less technical users;
- what tasks and specific context for them: have seen the wiki used most in squeak documentation; used for announcement like a topical blog, pages of discussion (loosely threaded, but not explicit structures); people tend to stay on topic, not scattered; discussion related to some software project that someone is working on; over time these comments packaged into some structure (like a how to); but main thing is information (getting the information out);
- hal has tried to implement this type organizational memory for ld3 but not yet call a success; he is the only one that really contributes; very little discussion; just as a depository of information generated by hal for projects he is working on;
- in the way that hal uses them: need to balance between getting things done quickly via a wiki, not necessarily taking advantage of all the markup capability and other features; [10:15]; hal personally also use email as a storage mechanism and searches e-mail for needed information;
- last year dlc course used wiki for coordination; not much discussion on the wiki;
- in the context of the swiki mailing list, hal tend to observe discussion taking place via email list and then someone would summarize that discussion and post it on the swiki [11:40]; perhaps because the wiki has a more permanent feel and that folks may feel that it is appropriate for things that have been agreed upon; organization memory; email as transient; wiki psychological because it has the versioning; and what they generate gets recorded even it it changed; hal mentioned that when he worked with hp someone informally said that the first time that someone get hold accountable for a wrong decision documented on a swiki that is when folks will be less inclined to record ongoing work product on the swiki [14:09]; in addition, lawyer can also mind these records for legal purposes [14:45];
- when hal need to create collaborative document generally falls back to work because you need to print from it; and all the tools are created around word (such as endnotes); even though word has limited features for collaboration (especially merging), word is still the tool of choice; the collaboration process is serial; some one may take a coordination role and compile everyone's contribution together, the process is still individual, working alone, and contributing his or her section to the coordinator that pulls everything together [16:00];
- living organization memory; based on zope; first pass was the dynasite (created a glossary, every time a document has the term, the term would be highlighted in the document;
- hal largest collaborative group about 50 people; a huge grant application; how the process worked? has a single owner of document and folks send their markup to the document from a previous version or send in their new paragraph; new version would get send out periodically;
- hal has not worked in situation with simultaneous co-editing; in most instance there is a face to face meeting to discuss substantive issue; in these instances, most folks take their own note, or someone would get appointed as a scribe, or ask every one to send in their notes for one person to summarize; most of these based on memory and individual notes;
- outside of face-to-face, communications occur in the context of revision; the collaboration occurs via suggested changes in the text of the document itself; this is even more pronounced when people are geographically scattered and cannot get together face-to-face [23:30];
- in the collaboration of production, when there is an disagreement then who ever owns the document or is more senior gets to decide; who determine if the group need a face-to-face meeting rather than working asynchronously? there is a project owner who determines that the group as a whole is not making progress and calls a face-to-face group meeting; (someone could also be having problem too if they are working too independently and not getting the collective feedback); or it could be a scheduling issue too [27:12];
- tacit vs. explicit; not fully capture the meaning so the group would need have some interactive social interaction to ensure that everyone is on the same page [26:00];
- fluidity of discussion (interactive) is different from the written word on the page; even having a verbal exchange provide addition sense of meaning; distance matter: even just having met the person really change the nature of later distance interaction -> get more context than just words alone [28:00];
- writing for own clarification is also an important activity; to help individual formulating individual thinking [30:00]; activity of writing have different functions: writing for individual understanding and writing to communicate to an audience; these activities may take place close together but they have different goals;
- in the context of interactive planning; PitaBoard: role playing mostly [32:00]; some issues in general: (1) role of expert providing model and whether participant trust the validity of the model (in the context of the cole neighborhood experience [33:00]); but not sure what folks would want to contribute;
- the closest interactive experience is working with an architect using the PitaBoard to design the DLC building [35:00]; collaboration is a key success; architects took a lot of written notes; tried to have some boundary objects but not alot [38:00];
- one characteristic is the ability to group/ structure potential solutions from the experts to participants;
- cole neighborhood; not electronic, but using paper models;
- making the expert's knowledge available to everyone in the planning exercise [43:00]; expert way to communicate information in context without perhaps being present or being in control of the process [45:00]; need an un-intrusive way to provide information that does not retard the participative process;
- how do users contribute? such as information that some one know (resources) that they can contribute, and also to provide questions / engage with the idea being discussed [47:00]; but also general discussion as well (to provide their reaction; also how to summarize the entire discussion from a previous meeting;
- three types of communications: (1) document history / adding to discussion space, (2) meta discussion (how the discussion is going), (3) writing for own understanding (like journaling/ bloging) [48:00];
- the most important part is delivering the background relevant information to the task at hand; delivering the right info to the right person at the right time [53:00];
- Elisa and Daniela did an assessment of the seeding, evolution, reseeding model – slides on the LD3 website;
          
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