workshop overview

attendees

organization & details

workshop outcomes

Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations
CSCW 2008
Hilton San Diego Resort
San Diego, CA, USA

Workshop Organization

This workshop will be run as a single day workshop on Sunday, November 9th, structured to provide maximum time for small group discussion and brainstorming. Prior to the workshop, we ask that each participant read the other participants' position statements, to ensure familiarity with the experiences and goals of other attendees and reduce the need to present this material.

The workshop runs from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. For those interested, we will go to dinner together afterwards.

The day will be divided into four sections:

1. The organizers will briefly describe the workshop. Then ~3 workshop attendees will give short (~7 minute) presentations chosen to provide a range of different issues or perspectives, followed by discussion.

2. Following these, the group will engage in a high-level brainstorming session to outline the key discussion topics for the day.

3. During the next session, the workshop will divide into small groups, moderated by the workshop organizers, and have focused discussions on the workshop themes.

4. In the fourth session the large group will reconvene and summarize any directions or advances identified from the breakout discussions. Finally, the workshop will end with a short discussion to define the immediate next steps for the group.

About the Organizers

Joan DiMicco is a researcher in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. Her research interests include social networks, visualizations, and collaboration technologies. She is most interested in understanding how these technologies change human behavior.

Werner Geyer is a researcher in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. His areas of research are in social software and computer-supported cooperative work. He is interested in building and evaluating innovative systems in this space, and recently he extended his research to the application of recommender technologies to social software and collaborative systems.

David R. Millen is a research manager in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. His group develops new social software applications and explores the social, business, and technological implications of these new tools through field studies with small teams and communities.

Jonathan Grudin works in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research, part of the Microsoft Corporation. His research is in human-computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work, with a particular focus on the design, adoption and use of group support technologies.

Original call for Position Papers:

Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit a 1 to 2 page extended abstract describing their research, experiences, or analyses of social networking software. Accepted participants should be prepared to read the abstracts of other accepted proposals prior to the workshop, which will focus on discussions around the themes and formulating a research plan for this domain.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Descriptions and analyses of attitudes toward and behaviors around social
  networking software in organizations, including inside-the-firewall and externally
  connected uses.
• Studies of the benefits of social software use by employees, such as social capital,
  team cohesion, and group dynamics.
• Governance of enterprise social network sites: Regulation of content and
  participation.
• Policies constraining the uses of social networking software in organizations, ranging
  from encouraging participation to blocking specific sites.
• Adoption, stickiness, and incentive systems to reach and maintain critical mass
  usage.
• Specialized social networking applications for specific organization purposes, roles,
  industries, or communities of practice (e.g., networking for legal professionals or
  restaurant suppliers, out-patient support, not-for-profit organization use, viral
  marketing campaigns).
• Integration and interplay with other enterprise information and communication
  systems and leveraging of social networking information for business-related
  problems in those systems.
• Studies of business value or establishment of metrics for identifying return on
  enterprise

Position papers following the CSCW formatting guidelines (Word version) (LaTeX version) are due Friday, September 26, 2008. Email submissions to joan.dimicco@us.ibm.com.