%0 Conference Paper %1 citeulike:249839 %A Mcdonald, David W. %A Ackerman, Mark S. %B Computer Supported Cooperative Work %D 1998 %K cscw skillinference community %P 315--324 %T Just Talk to Me: A Field Study of Expertise Location %U http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mcdonald98just.html %X Everyday, people in organizations must solve their problems to get their work accomplished. To do so, they often must find others with knowledge and information. Systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly interesting to organizations and scientific communities. But, as we begin to design and construct such systems, it is important to determine what we are attempting to augment. Accordingly, we conducted a five-month field study of a medium-sized software firm. We...

@inproceedings{citeulike:249839, abstract = {Everyday, people in organizations must solve their problems to get their work accomplished. To do so, they often must find others with knowledge and information. Systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly interesting to organizations and scientific communities. But, as we begin to design and construct such systems, it is important to determine what we are attempting to augment. Accordingly, we conducted a five-month field study of a medium-sized software firm. We...}, added-at = {2006-06-16T10:34:37.000+0200}, author = {Mcdonald, David W. and Ackerman, Mark S.}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2ac9f5101bee15b01d71591a4096f4431/ldietz}, booktitle = {Computer Supported Cooperative Work}, citeulike-article-id = {249839}, comment = {Extract: CSCW AND COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION SEEKING The CSCW and adjacent literatures have numerous attempts to facilitate finding information through social networks. Several systems have explicit models of expertise.1 The Answer Garden [2] and Answer Garden 2 [3] systems, designed to facilitate informal flows of information and their capture, have a naive view of expertise. Answer Garden allowed only a few levels of expertise in answering questions for users. While Answer Garden 2 had an explicit expertise-location engine and provided computer-mediated communications mechanisms to find others with a range of expertise, the mechanisms were not very elaborated. Two other systems help find people knowledgeable about a topic. Referral Web [12] helps find research experts. Refer- ral Web assumes a topical expertise among all co-authors, and therefore identifies expert individuals by their participation in co-author relationships. Yenta [7] creates and shares personal profiles based on text content analysis. It can then route messages along a network of inferred common interest (based on keyword or other indexing techniques). Both of these systems not only assume a single level of expertise, but also that one can determine a list of experts through merely textual analysis. While collaborative filtering systems [9, 13] can help find other people, they generally do not distinguish levels of expertise. A related system, Phoaks [10], can be used to identify who contributed information. This distinction among contributors allows a user to make judgements about the contributors’ expertise, but these must be inferred. None of these systems have very sophisticated models of expertise and information seeking. The social world is far more complex. Studies of collaborative problem-solving make this clear. For example, Allen [4] noted that engineers differentiate whom to ask with great nuance. Information seekers weigh the psychological cost of asking, including loss of status, expected reciprocity (i.e., likelihood of returning the favor), and social equity (i.e., how well they know the person socially). Cicourel’s study [5] of medical diagnosis provides ethnographic detail about the social complexity surrounding information seeking in organizations. Cicourel demonstrates that the expert’s knowledge, organizational status, and dayto- day interactions contribute to the attribution of expertise and authority by those who work with the expert. This complex set of reinforcing mechanisms supports and enhances the status of an expert as an expert. Additionally, Cicourel noted that both information seekers and experts make judgements about the validity of the information they receive. The specific structure of the organization in Cicourel’s study (i.e., a teaching hospital) led him to examine the structured interchange of expertise within daily face-toface meetings. Orr’s study [14] of copy repair technicians provides additional ethnographic detail about the social complexity of expertise. In the technicians’ work, learning by doing and through stories are the main mechanisms for displaying, sharing, and propagating expertise. Idiosyncrasies of the customer and their equipment, incomplete information about the state of a breakdown, and the relatively independent nature of the technician lead to expertise that cannot be formally codified or categorized. Like Cicourel’s doctors, the service technicians in Orr carefully weigh the selection and quality of information sources. As well, their use of their expertise in a diagnostic situation is constrained by many organizational and social factors. However, Orr’s major concern is the use of narrative in diagnosis and information sharing; he is only peripherally concerned with seeking expertise per se. Within this study, we extend Allen’s work in identifying potential sources of information. We have adopted Cicourel’s and Orr’s general point of view to examine finding expertise in technical support, bug tracking, and similar software activities. These work processes occupy a middle ground between the life-critical and highly personally interdependent medical work in Cicourel and between the relatively independently accomplished service work in Orr. We believe that the type of work processes we examined are common within workplaces, and our emphasis is on locating expertise within daily work.}, interhash = {badc9e55ec30bbca626a8cfb22ca7a85}, intrahash = {ac9f5101bee15b01d71591a4096f4431}, keywords = {cscw skillinference community}, pages = {315--324}, priority = {0}, timestamp = {2006-06-16T10:34:37.000+0200}, title = {Just Talk to Me: A Field Study of Expertise Location}, url = {http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mcdonald98just.html}, year = 1998 }