HCC: Small: A Joint Action Approach to Understanding and Supporting Interpersonal Attention In Virtual Organizations

该项目将开发一个理论和实践框架，用于理解和支持地理上分布的个人的虚拟组织中的人际注意力管理过程。虚拟组织（VO）的研究-跨越地理和机构边界的个人，设施和资源的聚合-是至关重要的，因为VO是一个越来越常见的工作结构。它们使原本无法一起工作的个人之间能够进行互动，共享稀缺资源，并允许以新颖的方式解决问题。尽管有这些优势，志愿组织的成员往往不能像那些被安排在一起的人那样有效地合作。其中一个原因是VO中机会主义的非正式互动的困难。这些交互对于故障排除和协调至关重要，例如当同事提出快速问题或响应他人的请求时，交换有关任务或环境的信息，或做出临时决定时。虽然许多虚拟组织提供基本的通信工具，如即时消息或视频会议，但成员往往不能有效地使用这些工具，因为这些工具缺乏对管理一个人的可用性和对他人的关注的微妙和细微差别的支持。因此，许多人只是偶尔关注来自合作者的消息，或者可能完全放弃技术。限制这一领域研究进展的一个问题是，以前的工作没有考虑注意力管理作为一种联合行动的形式，其中双方都采取行动，以回应对方。 本研究通过发展一个理论和实践框架来理解注意力管理的联合和适应性来解决这个问题。通过现场和实验室的努力相结合，这项工作解决了三个问题：（1）什么样的信息，人们寻求，他们愿意分享，因为他们共同传达注意力在今天的VO和分布式协作？(2)收集和展示之间的关系如何影响人们的任务表现，与他人的社会关系，他们对意识信息的使用，以及他们对隐私和分享的态度？ (3)我们如何整合异步和同步注意力行为？这项工作建立在人际意识和促进地理分布群体互动领域的研究基础上。它作出了几项贡献：（1）开发和测试VO注意力管理的联合行动框架，（2）检查同步和异步活动中的联合注意力管理，以及（3）使用下一代技术开发新工具，以促进注意力管理的分析，例如眼睛和手势跟踪。这项工作将提高我们支持虚拟组织中更自然、更有效协作的能力，虚拟组织已被确定为对国家竞争力至关重要，并且可以改善与老年人、残疾人和其他孤立个人的互动。 计算机支持的合作工作和其他形式的以计算机为媒介的交流也会受益。 结果将被纳入课堂学习活动，工作将由来自多个行为和技术学科的学生进行，从而吸引更广泛的学生到科学和工程学科。

This project will develop a theoretical and practical framework for understanding and supporting processes of interpersonal attention management in virtual organizations of geographically distributed individuals. Research on virtual organizations (VOs) - aggregations of individuals, facilities and resources that span geographic and institutional boundaries - is critical because VOs are an increasingly common work structure. They enable interaction between individuals who might not otherwise work together, the sharing of scarce resources, and allow novel ways of solving problems. Despite these advantages, members of VOs often cannot work together as effectively as those who are collocated. One reason for this is the difficulty of opportunistic, informal interactions in VOs. These interactions are critical to troubleshooting and coordination, as when co-workers ask quick questions or respond to others' requests, exchange information about the task or environment, or make spur-of-the-moment decisions. While many virtual organizations provide basic communication tools such as instant messaging or video conferencing, members often cannot use these effectively because the tools lack support for the subtlety and nuance of managing one's availability and attention to others. As a result, many people only sporadically attend to messages from collaborators, or may abandon technologies altogether. One problem limiting research progress in this area is that prior work has not considered attention management as a form of joint action in which both parties act in response to each other. This research addresses this problem by developing a theoretical and practical framework for understanding the joint and adaptive nature of attention management. Through a combination of field and laboratory efforts, this work addresses three issues: (1) What information do people seek, and what are they willing to share as they jointly convey attention in today's VOs and distributed collaborations? (2) How does the relationship between gathering and display impact people's task performance, social relationships with others, their use of awareness information, and their attitudes toward privacy and sharing? (3) How do we integrate asynchronous and synchronous attention behaviors? This work builds on research in the area of interpersonal awareness and fostering interaction in geographically distributed groups. It makes several contributions: (1) developing and testing a joint action framework for attention management in VOs, (2) examining joint attention management in synchronous and asynchronous activities, and (3) developing novel tools using next-generation technologies to facilitate analysis of attention management, such as eye and gesture tracking. This work will improve our ability to support more natural and effective collaboration in virtual organizations, which have been identified as critical to national competitiveness and can improve interaction with aging, disabled and otherwise isolated individuals. Computer-supported cooperative work and other forms of computer-mediated communication can benefit. Results will be incorporated into classroom learning activities, and work will be carried out by students from multiple behavioral and technical disciplines, thus drawing a broader population of students to the science and engineering disciplines.