Supporting Workers in Developing Effective Collaboration Skills for Complex Work

Overview

This one-day, in-person workshop aims to support participants in reflecting, ideating, and prototyping new socio-technical approaches to help workers develop effective collaboration skills for complex work. While CSCW researchers have created tools to provide workers access to collaboration opportunities, workers require more support in learning to collaborate effectively to benefit from these opportunities. This workshop invites academic and industry researchers who study these topics and develop socio-technical systems for workplaces to participate. Participants will share insights from their work and work with each other to envision an agenda for future research and design of workplaces that support learning how to collaborate. Discussion and ideas generated from this workshop will be synthesized and archived online for the larger research community and the general public. We hope these discussions will foster new collaborations and further develop a community of researchers interested in supporting learning in the future of work. More information can be found in our workshop proposal.

The workshop will take place in-person at CSCW 2023 on Sunday October 15th, from 9:00am - 5:00pm.

Call for Participation

Interested participants should submit a short paper describing original research and articulation of a contributor's interest and experience in workshop topics. Interested participants should describe either: Their research, preliminary or completed, related to the topics of this workshop; or a position paper arguing for a particular idea or approach related to the topics of the workshop.

Paper should use ACM Extended Abstracts Format and be 3-5 pages long (excluding references). Submissions will be reviewed by the organizers based on both relevance and originality. Please submit papers to eveyhuang@u.northwestern.edu by September 1st, 2023 Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time.

Workshop Agenda

This highly interactive workshop will involve presentations, discussions, and design activities. At the start of the workshop, organizers will give short talks (5 minutes) to show examples of their work and perspectives on how workplaces can adapt their ways of working to support learning effective collaboration skills; they will also share what they are excited to discuss in the workshop. In addition, workshop attendees will give a short, 2-3 minute summary of their position paper and their interests and goals of the workshop. Following introductions, we will split participants into groups based on the themes of their perspectives. Each group will participate in three activities to reflect on, ideate, and prototype new socio-technical approaches that workplaces can adopt to support workers in learning to collaborate. Finally, we will do a reflection panel with all organizers and attendees to discuss ideas generated throughout the workshop.

A tentative agenda is as follows:

09:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. -- Introductions and short talks
10:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m. -- Coffee break
10:15 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. -- Activity 1: Team reflection on current practices
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. -- Activity 2: Ideate and Activity 3: Prototype
12:00 p.m. - 01:30 p.m. -- Lunch
01:30 p.m. - 02:30 p.m. -- Activity 3: Prototype (continued)
02:30 p.m. - 02:45 p.m. -- Coffee break
02:45 p.m. - 04:00 p.m. -- Prototype share out
04:00 p.m. - 04:45 p.m. -- Activity 4: Sharing and Reflection Panel
04:45 p.m. - 05:00 p.m. -- Synthesis + Closing

Organizers

Evey Huang

Ph.D. Student, Northwestern University

Evey Huang is a Ph.D. student in the Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) program, a joint program between computer science and communication studies, at Northwestern University. She studies and designs mixed-initiative human-AI systems to support learners in solving real-world, ill-defined problems. She considers how AI technologies might collaborate with human coaches to monitor learners' progress, diagnose potential risks and obstacles, and provide learners with regular, dedicated support.

Kapil Garg

Ph.D. Student, Northwestern University

Kapil Garg is a Ph.D. student in the Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) program, a joint program between computer science and communication studies, at Northwestern University. His work develops and studies networked orchestration technologies to support knowledge workers engaging in situated work activities within socio-technical work and learning environments. He considers how these systems can help workers monitor for opportunities to collaborate and strategize how these opportunities can progress their work or learning goals.

Diego Gómez-Zará

Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame

Diego Gómez-Zará is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Mendoza College Business (by courtesy) at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on how social computational systems help people organize and collaborate. His work has been at the forefront of computational social science, human-computer interaction, and network science.

Julie Hui

Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Julie Hui is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. She investigates how technology influences access to work and employment. Specifically, she studies how digital technologies facilitate help-seeking, agency, and social support in informal work contexts, such as among gig workers and under-resourced small business owners.

Chinmay Kulkarni

Associate Professor, Emory University

Chinmay Kulkarni is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Emory University, where he directs the Expertise@Scale lab. His work is at the intersection of large data and automation, learning, and the future of work. In his research, he investigates how the new affordances of scale and automation can create new opportunities for people to learn and work more effectively. His research introduces novel computer systems that demonstrate benefits at a large scale that is otherwise not achievable. His recent work has focused on creating systematic opportunities for building empathy in remote organizations, helping participants re-imagine their collaborative roles through collective reflection and co-design, and how AI might result in new kinds of work (and art).

Michael Massimi

Senior Principal Researcher, Slack

Michael Massimi is a Senior Principal Researcher at Slack where he manages academic partnerships. His research focuses on how knowledge workers communicate and collaborate. Prior to Slack, he worked on Facebook Groups and at Microsoft Research. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

Elizabeth Churchill

Senior Director of UX, Google; Co-Chair, Google's UX Leadership Council

Elizabeth Churchill is a Senior Director of UX at Google and Co-Chair of Google's UX Leadership Council. She has built research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC, and FujiXerox. Her current focus is on the design of effective designer and developer tooling for a new operating system, Fuchsia.

Elizabeth Gerber

Professor, Northwestern University; Co-Director, Northwestern's Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design; Faculty Founder, Design for America

Elizabeth Gerber is a Professor at Northwestern University, the Co-Director and Founder of Northwestern's Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design, and Faculty Founder of Design for America. She helps organizations design and implement new technologies to collaborate effectively.