Practically Accomplishing Participation

With the emergence of technologies designed to support social activities online, it is beneficial to explore their potential in novel application areas. These studies, in the research tradition of Bowers et al. (1996), can be used to evaluate and develop technologies while providing the opportunity to study the social practices that develop around their use. We examine the use of online seminar technologies in a new situation of rising interest – networking events in six exploratory studies. These events encouraged 'networking' interaction between guests. Evaluation was conducted through ethnomethodological analysis of recordings of text and audio interaction. We present findings of dual technical and social interest. Socially, we reveal practises employed by participants in achieving taking-part-in-these-events. Participants employ everyday interactional competencies and develop them for the situational specifics. Technically, we evaluate the applications for the purposes of networking events. Through locating the difficulties participants exhibit and highlighting their interactional practises we provide a design resource. The central focus is on the practical accomplishment of participation. Much of the activity concerns its achievement and maintenance. Participation is a mutually accomplished social interactional activity founded on presence, which involves constructing shared understandings for all practical purposes. Where understandings deteriorate participants 'work' to re-establish participation. Troubles arise and participants engage in interactional practices to work out what is going on and identify and resolve problems. The work involved in and the fragility of participation is demonstrated. We highlight how this pre-work, which is foundational to networking, occupies much of the interaction before offering ideas aimed at reducing this burden. Introduction and Background During the last fifteen or so years studies of a broadly ethnomethodological tradition (ethnographic, conversation analytic (CA) and interaction analytic studies) have been presented and increasingly established, in the literature of some specialised areas of computer science (for a review see Luff et al., 2000). This is particularly noticeable in the disciplines of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human computer interaction (HCI). The mutual attraction, and fruitful partnership, between specialised areas of sociology and computer science can be roughly characterised as follows. Studies of the organisation of work have been an important strand of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1986) and with the increasing prevalence of computer systems in the workplace, studies that deal with action and interaction with and around technologies have become increasingly commonplace. When this is coupled with the fact that computer science departments now offer a new opportunity for sociologists to pursue their research, one can see the attraction from the perspective of the ethnomethodologist. On the part of the computer scientist, ethnomethodology has been shown to be useful in a number of ways. Ethnomethodology can provide the type of detailed description of how work is achieved as a situated activity that is not captured by the conventional, information centred, abstracted descriptions of work processes used in the mainstream of systems design. Many working within computer science now acknowledge, that while such conventional descriptions are useful and necessary, the paucity of description they provide for systems which are thoroughly socio-technical can lead to problems. For example, where important aspects of how the work is achieved are omitted in considerations of system redesign. Such omissions have been shown to be implicated in the failure or 'bad fit' of new technologies. As well as dealing with how ethnomethodological studies can augment conventional system description and design (e.g. Hughes et al. 1994; Martin, 2000) the research has furnished those within CSCW and HCI with new sensitivities (Button and Dourish, 1996). This can be seen in the commonplace use of terms such as coordination, awareness, and affordances in the literature. It is studies in this tradition that form the main corpus of ethnomethodological studies of work and technology. In terms of the system life-cycle and development process ethnomethodological studies have generally been conceived of as being most appropriate and of most use when carried out prior to or accompanying work redesign or the development of a new technology, or post-implementation. Many projects that involve work redesign and/or the development or evolution of technologies utilise a description of the current system as a resource for design. Ethnomethodological studies have been deployed to augment this in a number of ways. For example, through enhancing the system description with 'real world real-time details of work', or providing some form of assessment of how a new design might impact on current practice, or by even contributing some form of requirements for a new system to support aspects of existing activity (Martin, 2000). Post-implementation studies are generally evaluative in nature and often draw attention to problems that arise from new systems. Particularly where these systems fail to support important aspects of how work was previously organised (e.g. Bowers et al., 1995). Such studies may be used as a resource for further systems design or refinement. As with the programme of ethnomethodology, the focus has been on studying 'naturally occurring' everyday action. Clearly when we move into the domain of design we are moving away from ethnomethodology into a more creative pursuit in which some form of translation must apply. However, most ethnomethodologists working in this area are willing to draw a separation between the integrity of the study itself and the need for design to perform this rendering, if it is done with the right sensitivity. However, such a framework necessarily limits the relevance and application of ethnomethodology in design. What of situations where technology development is not clearly tied to a redesign of current practice, where the situation is technology-led and new areas of application are sought, and so forth? Such situations are commonplace in technology development, particularly with the current expansion of web-based applications, virtual environments (VE's) and mobile computing. Does ethnomethodology have nothing to contribute? Here we are in a situation where, for example, there is a need to think more creatively about how ethnomethodological studies of work and technology may contribute to design (e.g. see Bowers and Martin, 1999). Alternatively, we need to consider whether ethnomethodological principles can influence other traditional systems design areas such as application testing. 1 Ethnomethodological studies have drawn particular attention to the practices by which workers coordinate with each other, how they make and are made aware of aspects one another's work and how activity, artifacts and aspects of the workplace layout afford information to competent members about the status of work (see Hughes et al., 1997; Martin et al. 1997) When new technologies are developed, in both academic and industrial settings, practitioners will often conduct studies aimed at evaluating the utility of the technologies for novel application areas or potential scenarios of use. Of course, one could legitimately study situations where the current practice one is seeking to support pre-exists and evaluate the technology on the basis of whether and where it supports current activity. However, as is well known, the introduction of a new technology will necessarily lead to the development of new practices. Surely, if one accepts the utility of the ethnomethodological approach in this field, it is possible to see how it may provide a useful orientation for testing applications in new potential situations of use even though they are constructed for this purpose rather than found. Application testing is routinely carried out using constructed situations or research lab-based implementations (see for e.g. Erickson et al. (e.g. 1999) and some of these studies have an ethnomethodological flavour providing a richness of detail and new understanding of the practices users employ when interacting with the technology and one another both beyond and through the technology (e.g. Bowers et al. (1996 a & b). The study presented in this paper follows in the research tradition exemplified by Bowers and colleagues in conducting ethnomethodological studies of the exploratory use of collaborative virtual environments ((CVE's) 1996a & b). We detail findings achieved through ethnomethodological analyses of a series of exploratory, on-line networking events conducted using a variety of commercially available web-based seminar technologies. These technologies incorporate, for example, text chat, live streaming audio, shared presentation mechanisms and other collaborative features and are designed to support on-line presentations in which talks may be given and received in real-time and interaction supported via the communication channels. Such technologies offer promise for supporting event based, distributed networking in that they could allow previously unacquainted and acquainted, geographically distributed persons to 'congregate' to listen to a relevant presentation and interact with the presenter and each other as a way of making and re-affirming contacts. This however is a different use from that for which the systems were designed and so a series of events was held. The events being designed to explore the use of such technologies for networking events. We were interested in analysing the action and interaction taking place, both as a resource for design and also from a more sociological perspective. That is, we were interested in detailing the practices employed by participants in taking part in these events. What was clear was that much of the activity we observed was to do with the achievement and maintenance of participation itself; individual and group presence, making sense of what was occurring and creating mutual understandings for all practical purposes. Of course, this is what we are inevitably engaged in whenever we interact, but what was perspicuous about these settings was the pre-occupation with this foundational activity over any discussions of presentation topic, networking activity (e.g. exchange of personal/work details, commitments to future contacts, etc.). In face-to-face situations participation does not usually require such extensive or explicit work and the 2 The primary concern of on-line presentations is to get the presentation across to the audience and allow the audience to ask questions of the presenter, thus interaction in presentations is primarily one-to-many. The primary communication in networking events, is by its nature guest-guest communication. business in hand can be got to and focused on relatively easily. Doubtless the preoccupation with this foundational work in these situations is partly to do with badly performing technology but our contention would also be that people are also deploying and adapting their interactional competencies for this more problematic novel situation. It is clearly of sociological interest to document this but also importantly it suggests that if these technologies are to be used for event based, distributed networking they need to be developed to better support the achievement and maintenance of participation. This paper aims to contribute to both these agendas. The Events And The Technologies In all six events were held. Each event consisted of a short presentation, which was used as a draw to attract guests to the event, a short question and answer session and a discussion session. It was hoped that the pre-presentation period and the discussion session would provide the opportunities for guests to interact and this format was inspired by the format of current face-to-face networking events held by Manchester Chamber of Commerce, which involve a reception period, lunch or breakfast and a short presentation. Each on-line event was attended by a presenter, a facilitator and a small number of guests (between 4 and 8). The guests attended from all over the world, were mainly business people, although a few worked in an academic environment and were mostly unacquainted with one another. Profiles of each of the participants were provided on an event web sit, which also provided log on details, etc. The systems used for each event were; ® Event 1 : PlaceWare with RealAudio ® Event 2 : Net2gether (N2g) with Firetalk ® Event 3 : PlaceWare with Firetalk ® Event 4 : WebEx ® Event 5 : Centra ® Event 6 : PlaceWare with RealAudio. Firetalk and RealAudio were used to provide audio where none was provided by the system. Screen shots showing PlaceWare, WebEx and Centra are provided at the end of the paper. Data consists of recorded text chats between the participants, transcribed audio and field notes from observation of certain participants in certain events which serve to augment some of the text and audio chat with details of the wider context within which some of interaction took place. The following sections will provide examples from the events illustrating how participants worked around the social and technical limitations of the systems to practically accomplish participation in these events. Practically Accomplishing Participation What is participation? Clearly in one sense this is not a question that can be exhaustively answered. Is just 'being there' participation or must one speak to others, set up new partnerships, business deals, future meetings and so forth? At a basic level we consider 3 In a networking event. participation as 'being there' in the shared on-line situation and as having the ability to receive and send communications (i.e. interact with others), as well as to see and hear what is meant to be shared. Basically, that one has a recognisable presence and an ability to communicate in a shared situation. As background to the project we conducted an ethnographic study of current networking events. These events were characterised by talk talk about many topics chat, personal details, business, the event itself. Contacts were made, retrospective meetings revisited, prospective contacts projected. Becoming acquainted, renewing contacts and talk about business seem to be activities that characterise networking and networking events provided a situation in which such activities were facilitated How should participation be dealt with in these trial situations? In these, if contacts were made, business set up and so forth, all well and good. However, this being a trial situation we were fundamentally concerned with whether the participants could achieve a satisfactory level of participation in the business-at-hand – which in this case is the business of participating in a trial networking event. Could participants successfully meet and greet one another, listen to a talk, ask questions, chat to one another? If they could do this, it would suggest that it would be possible to use similar technologies and events for networking purposes. But instead most of the actual work-at-hand involved achieving a basic level of participation – being there, in the same situation as everyone else, seeing and hearing the same things and knowing, for all practical purposes, that this is the case. This is of prior concern to being able to participate in the events as ‘doing being a networking participant’ – or even ‘doing being a participant in a networking trial’. This is, of course, completely different than making any judgement as to the quality of the participation offered by individual participants, we are not making any assessment about whether people participate more, better, or whatever. Instead we are looking at what makes them able to participate in the first place and the practices they use in order to achieve and maintain this. Of course, the work of constructing, reconstructing and repairing a shared view and understanding (for all practical purposes) involves on-going interaction. However, because here such work is actually the central focus of interaction, this necessarily precludes chatting about other things, i.e. attending to the intended business at hand. In the following sections we will look at how participation is achieved, maintained, downgraded, broken and repaired. Presence As A Participatory Achievement Presence in these systems is a collaborative activity, achieved through a combination of systems and interactional resources. All of the systems used for the events provide some presence indicators: ® All systems provide a participants list (listing log on names) showing all the people who are logged onto the system. ® PlaceWare, Firetalk and N2g all produce an automated joining event (AJE) when participants log on to the system. An AJE is a text chat notification, displayed in the chat window. 4 For example, through artefacts such as the delegates list, the organisation of and conventions of the sitdown meal, etc. Participants use these systems indications of presence as one means of establishing who is present at an event. For example, in PlaceWare the AJE is often followed by greeting exchanges (e.g. Extract 1). Extract 1 : Event 1 PlaceWare text chat 64 (unknown) enters Section B, Row 1. 65 (unknown) changes name to Guest 41. 66 Guest 41 changes name to Majed. 67 Evan : Hi Majed However, these systems indicators of presence indicate merely who is logged onto the system, not whether they are actually present in terms of attending to the system or being available for chat. Participants demonstrate through their interactions that they are aware that the systems indications of presence are not always reliable. For example in Event 1 Roberts first line of chat is ‘anyone there?’ (20, Extract 2). Extract 2 : Event 1 PlaceWare text chat 17 (unknown) enters Section B, Row 1. 18 (unknown) changes name to Guest 32. 19 Guest 32 changes name to Robert. 20 Robert : anyone there? This talk occurred when the row window showed that Evan was in the row, so the question might seem somewhat incongruous, except that this occurs about 30 minutes prior to the official start of the event. Thus although the awareness indicators (i.e. names in the row window) showed people were present, Robert’s question demonstrates that he is aware that this means only that they were logged on, rather than present in terms of attending to the chat. Indeed he receives no reply, suggesting that no one else is actually present and he logs off. In another example, also from Event 1, Evan greets Dr. Dan, the presenter when he is not actually present in the row. Evan, who has just arrived is involved in greeting sequences with the facilitator (jackio) and Robert, another participant. At the time of these greetings the slides are changing in the presentation window for all participants as Dan runs through his presentation. Jackio informs the participants of what is going on (40, Extract 3) and this is clarified by Evan’s question (42) and jackio’s answer (45). Evan then greets Dan (46), however Dan can not actually see this greeting. This is because of the way PlaceWare separates participants into different ‘rows’ of chat, with the participants list showing only those in the row. Thus although the systems indicator shows that Dan is not present in the row, Evan greets him anyway, presumably because of his noticeable activity on the system. Extract 3 : Event 1 PlaceWare text chat 35 (unknown) enters Section B, Row 1. 36 (unknown) changes name to Evan.