How it works
This method should be used during the initial session of people who have to collaborate. Immediately after the initial round of who is who and why are we here together today, form pairs of people from different backgrounds, cultures, organizations or whatever barrier you wish to level. Ask these pairs to write down on sticky notes what prejudices their colleagues might have against people from the other “side”. It is important not to ask what prejudices they have; as that might result in only the politically correct responses. While they are writing these down, walk around and stimulate them with questions such as: “What did your colleages say when they heard you had this session?”.

After a few minutes, when you notice that “the popcorn stops popping” ask the people from one “side” to read out what they have written down. Write key terms on a big piece of paper. Try to defer any defence (“I would like to react on that…”, “Let me put that straight…”) to the next phase. Then ask the people from the other side to read out what they have written down and collect their key terms on a different piece of paper. Then start the next phase by just asking “Who would like to react?”

Our experience is that this method is a powerful starter for cross-organizational collaboration projects.

(c) photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/agharti

The decision process that was central in the experiment focused on a spatial decision problem. A team had to make a decision on the use of a vacant piece of land situated in an urban area. The virtual world of Second Life was used to create a virtual image of an urban area.

Group Decision Making in Second Life

Participants in the experiment were 240 students of Business Administration, randomly assigned to teams of 3 persons. Participants were unaware of who their team mates were as they were placed in different rooms.

Based on information they were given beforehand, teams were asked to decide what to do with the vacant piece of land. After reaching their decision, they were asked to fill out a survey in which a number of relevant variables concerning their interaction and decision making were measured. The results provide a number of interesting insights into the added value of virtual worlds for distributed group decision making, in terms of both interaction and decision quality. As the experiment will be continued in 2009 with people working in organizations, we cannot provide any more information on the results here – unfortunately…

Conducting this experiment has been a very valuable experience, providing interesting conclusions as to how people may collaborate through virtual environments. It has also provided us with interesting insights in terms of how to conduct such an experiment – insights which will be incorporated into the follow-up experiment to be conducted in 2009!

The researchers: Frans Feldberg, Alexander Schouten & Bart van den Hooff,
VU University Amsterdam,
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration,
Section Knowledge, Information & Networks

Imagine you would like to discuss an important matter with a specific colleague. You walk into her room only to discover that she is not in. You pick up your mobile phone, search for the phone number and call her. However, she rejects the phone call. You waste precious time walking to her room, your matter is not discussed and possibly you are annoyed by the fact that your colleague did not react. On the other hand your colleague is, due to your call, interrupted from her current activity. A major reason for such situations is that your context and the context of your colleague do not match. In the example above, the location and current activity of you and your colleague do not match. Nevertheless, you still would like to discuss the matter with her. You can either stay monitoring the room of your colleague or start a meeting scheduling process (for example using Outlook). Both processes require your attention and information to judge whether the right conditions exist for the meeting to take place.

We envision a system, which we call AYEC (‘At Your Earliest Convenience’), that facilitates ‘schedule and forget’’: A user can schedule a meeting and specify conditions under which this meeting can take place. He does not have to monitor these conditions (‘forget’), since the system evaluates when the specified conditions become true and subsequently notifies the intended participants. In this way, the system takes over the monitoring task.

For example, you would like to sit down and have a brief talk with two colleagues on a specific topic. You specify in the system which colleagues you would like to meet and specify that all of you should be in the same office, available for interruption and working on the same project. Currently, one of these colleagues is out of the building. When the system detects this colleague enters the building the specified meeting conditions become true and the system sends everybody a request to meet.

AYEC is enabled by evolutions in available sensory devices and the rise of ubiquitous communications. AYEC uses collected information to adapt to the situations of users. This paradigm is called context-awareness. This paradigm is currently being explored in the Future Workspaces project by Tom Broens, Cristian Hesselman and Maarten Wegdam of Novay.