Collective Practices in Common Information

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Collective Practices in Common Information Spaces: Insight From Two Case Studies a

Demosthenes Akoumianakis & Chrisoula Alexandraki

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Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece Accepted author version posted online: 27 Mar 2012.Version of record first published: 23 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Demosthenes Akoumianakis & Chrisoula Alexandraki (2012): Collective Practices in Common Information Spaces: Insight From Two Case Studies, Human–Computer Interaction, 27:4, 311-351 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2012.678235

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HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2012, Volume 27, pp. 311–351 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0737-0024 print / 1532-7051 online DOI: 10.1080/07370024.2012.678235

Collective Practices in Common Information Spaces: Insight From Two Case Studies

Downloaded by [Technological Educational Institute] at 03:56 09 November 2012

Demosthenes Akoumianakis and Chrisoula Alexandraki Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

This research explores the design of practice toolkits as components, distinct from community management systems, allowing members of a virtual community to engage in the practice the community is about. Our analysis is informed by two case studies in different application domains each presenting alternative but complementary insights to the design of computer-mediated practice toolkits. The first case study describes how established practices in music performance are encapsulated in a suitably augmented music notation toolkit so as to support the learning objectives of virtual teams engaged in music master classes. The second case study presents experience with the development of a toolkit for engaging in the practice of vacation package assembly. This time the virtual team is a cross-organization virtual community of practice whose members streamline their efforts by internalizing and performing in accordance to a new (virtual) practice. Findings from the two studies reveal two distinct orientations in the design of practice toolkits. Specifically, in application domains where practices are well established (i.e., music performance), the toolkit serves as the medium for reconstructing an existing practice in virtual settings. In contrast, when cross-organization collaboration is involved (i.e., vacation package assembly), the toolkit should be designed so as to encapsulate a ‘‘meta’’-practice, exhibiting both boundary and locality.

1. INTRODUCTION For several years now, social scientists and practice scholars have embarked on a variety of research efforts seeking to understand the dynamics of societies on the Demosthenes Akoumianakis is a computer scientist with an interest in human–computer interaction; he is professor in the Department of Applied Information Technology and Multimedia of the Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece. Chrisoula Alexandraki is a computer scientist with a focus on music technology; she is a lecturer in the Department of Music Technology and Acoustics of the Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece. 311

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CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 2. UNDERSTANDING PRACTICE 2.1. The Practice-Turn in HCI 2.2. Information Infrastructures for Distributed Collective Practicing 2.3. The Need for Distributed Collective Practice Toolkits Consolidation Requirements for Distributed Collective Practice Toolkits 3. RESEARCH CONTEXT, FOCUS, AND APPROACH 3.1. Research Questions 3.2. Methodology and Research Methods Exploratory Step Designing Practice Toolkits Assessment and Evaluation 4. CASE STUDIES 4.1. Online Music Interpretation Lessons Methods The Music Interpretation Toolkit Lessons Learned, Practice, and Experience 4.2. Vacation Package Assembly: A New Boundary-Spanning Practice Methods The Vacation Package Assembly Toolkit Evaluating the Vacation Package Assembly Toolkit 5. CROSS-CASE ANALYSIS 5.1. Practice-Based Insights 5.2. Community Types and Management 6. DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, AND CONCLUDING REMARKS 6.1. Revisiting the Research Questions 6.2. Practice Toolkits Versus Collaborative Management Information Systems 6.3. Concluding Remark and Future Work

grounds of what people do (Certeau, 1984; Giddens, 1984). In this endeavor, several key questions are being debated, such as what constitute elements of practice (Schatzki, 1996; Schatzki, Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001; Turner, Bowker, Gasser, & Zacklad, 2006), how practice is instituted through activities (Barnes, 2001), and how practice evolves in social contexts (Orlikowski, 2000). In all these efforts, practice is conceived as a social construct, which becomes meaningful through the history of coexistence of social agents in various community settings. As a result of such coexistence, practice is reproduced, negotiated, and frequently expanded (Barnes, 2001, pp. 23–24; Orlikowski, 2002, p. 271). The literature offers several examples on how established practices such as identity management (Halperin & Backhouse, 2009), civic inattention (Goffman, 1963), and television viewing (Ducheneaut, Moore, Oehlberg, Thornton, & Nickell, 2008) are modified in virtual space as a result of the digital medium for social interaction. Nevertheless, very little is known about the prerequisites for


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reconstructing practice online or the conditions that lead to the proliferation of new practices perceived and enacted only in virtual space. In this article, we are keen to examine how practice is manifested in virtual community settings and how the virtual setting encapsulates, extends, or redefines the practice the community is about. Through an improved understanding of such intertwining, it is argued that novel virtualities can be better framed, conceptualized, and explained. Reviewing the relevant literature through this lens, one can easily reach the conclusion that the vast majority of studies on virtual communities tend to dismiss the community’s underlying practice, emphasizing community management and how it may be fostered and facilitated through technology. The few studies concerned explicitly with practice and how it is enacted or transformed through technology across different organizational settings (Levina & Vaast, 2005; Orlikowski, 2002) consider technology either as a ‘‘black-box’’ or in terms of its embodied symbols and material properties (Orlikowski, 2000). Very little attention, if any, is devoted to the actual design knowledge and the features constituting and shaping technology use in practice. In the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) there have been attempts to provide more enlightening accounts. For instance, Suchman (1987, p. 203) and Lave (1988, p. 214) have claimed that practice is bounded in a specific material, historical, and social context that shapes what agents do and gives meaning to habitual actions. Considering physical or keystroke-level interaction as habitual action, this view suggests a closer insight into the design of symbols, notations, tools, and processes facilitating coengagement by members of a community in recurrent, materially bounded, and situated action. Nevertheless, the vast majority of recent works tends to constrain their analysis on data logs of repetitive, textually mediated, and routine use of technology, thus overemphasizing social interactions as the context through which practice is revealed. As a result, artifactual and material properties of the technology at hand and its inscribed structures are frequently dismissed or overlooked. Our recent experience as presented in this article indicates that conceiving practice as being textually mediated and thus framed in social interactions may not be sufficient to explain novel virtualities or inform their design. Moreover, although community management may foster social ties, it is practicing in community settings that may lead to improved capacity, deepening of professional knowledge, and innovation. In this vein, the present work advocates the separation of community management from the practice the community is about and concentrates on how practice is manifested, enacted, processed, and transmitted in virtual settings to facilitate distributed communities of practice. In doing so, we assume that practice is revealed through the history of coengagement in linguistic domains that lead to an act of communication and focus on practice-oriented toolkits and how they can be designed to facilitate enactment of either established or new practices. The term ‘‘linguistic domain’’ is borrowed from Maturana and Varela (1992), where it is defined as ‘‘systems of learned communicative behavior that arise between organisms as the result of their ‘particular history of co-existence’ ’’ (p. 207). As for the term practice-oriented toolkit, it is used to refer to a collection of tools through


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which elements of a designated practice are encapsulated and recurrently enacted by members. Consequently, it should not be confused with graphical user interface toolkits and the notion of software components capable of being reused in a variety of applications. The approach that is followed builds on results of two case studies in different application domains, each presenting alternative but complementary insights to the design of computer-mediated practice toolkits. The common bond across the two cases is twofold and concerns (a) how practice is technologically mediated (i.e., enacted using dedicated software tools), and (b) how new practices may arise as a result of coengagement of members and become institutionalized within a virtual community of practice. A related issue, briefly commented but not exhausted in the present work, is that of the interrelationship between online and offline constituents of practice in virtual organizations. Collectively, the experiences gained from these case studies lead to a few guidelines useful for developers of practice-oriented toolkits. The remainder of the article is structured as follows. The next section establishes links with theory-based insights into practice and briefly discusses the practiceoriented turn in the context of HCI. Our aim is to solicit requirements for designing practice-oriented toolkits and justify the research focus of the article. Then we summarize the research context for the present work and elaborate on relevant research questions and methodology. The following section presents two case studies, each facilitating a different but complementary insight to our key research objectives. A cross-case discussion consolidates our findings and provides useful insight to the design of practice-oriented toolkits. The article is wrapped up by summarizing key contributions and by identifying areas of ongoing and future research.

2. UNDERSTANDING PRACTICE Defining practice is not trivial, as different disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, organization, and management science offer alternative instruments, views, and perspectives to frame the term (Jarzabkowski, 2005; Lave & Wenger 1991; Schatzki et al., 2001; Schmidt, 2000). However, independent of theoretical standpoint there is a body of key issues that seem to be common concerns for practice-oriented researchers. First, practice is conceived in terms of activities (Giddens, 1984; Orlikowski, 2002, p. 256) meaningful for the people or the practice being analyzed. Making sense of these activities entails an understanding of their object of reference, which must be clearly defined and labeled in terms of symbolic manifestation and relational properties. Second, practice is engaged by human agents who share, obey, and adhere to a designated field of expertise (Levina & Vaast, 2005) without necessarily enacting or appropriating the practice in the same manner. Through their engagement in fields, agents produce different kinds of resources (capital) that they can accumulate and use for different purposes. As a consequence, practice articulation may vary according


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to cultural background, folklore knowledge, and individual values. Third, activities embedded in or subsumed by practice are built on knowledge, skills, or competences of reflexive agents or communities who engage to produce, reproduce, or transform structures, which in turn enable and constrain their actions (Giddens, 1984). Consequently, practice is learned from others, and although individually administered, this learning occurs through an ongoing sensitivity to what other practitioners are doing (Barnes, 2001, p. 26). Through practices disclosed in and transmitted via some form or language, people are revealed as social peers.

2.1. The Practice-Turn in HCI Early scholarly works rooted in social-science-inspired HCI have concentrated on practice as revealed through the analysis of linguistic expressions built using language, signs, pictures, and so on. Subsequent efforts (Carroll & Rosson, 1992; Dourish, 2001; Hutchins, 1995; Suchman, 1987) focus on theories and constructs appropriate for understanding practice as a social construct, thus signifying a practice turn in HCI. In a similar vein, activity theorists (Engeström, 1999) conceive practice as subsuming activity and seek to conceptualize its characteristic properties. In a series of published works, Jarzabkowski (2003, 2004, 2005) made a distinction between activity and practice, defining activity as constituted by the actions of and interactions between actors as they perform their daily duties and roles, whereas practice is used to refer to activity patterns across actors, which provides order and meaning to a set of otherwise banal activities. Practice is also qualified as being performative in the sense that it is accomplished by skilled actors who rely on both codified knowledge and experience to understand and assess how practices can be applied, altered, or tailored to attain specific goals. In turn, the performative nature of practice affords variation in its enactment (Schmidt, Wagner, & Tolar, 2007), and such variation may be attributed to institutional or technological factors. Traditionally, information technology served as a medium through which members of a network of practice transmit, communicate, store, and circulate information regarding their professional practice (Wasko & Faraj, 2005). The recent literature offers a variety of examples regarding the type of online practices prevailing in application domains such as free and open source software projects (Scacchi, Feller, Fitzgerald, Hissam, & Lakhani, 2006), new product development (Franke & Piller, 2004; Franke & Shah, 2001; von Hippel & Katz, 2002), and so on. Moreover, there are several genres of software tools designed to support social construction of knowledge through a variety of online (generative) practices. Representative examples include tools for information sharing (i.e., electronic mailing lists or LISTSERVs, Wikis, blogs, and RSS), virtual prototypes and simulations (Franke & Piller, 2004; von Hippel & Katz, 2002), tools for memory management (Ackerman, 1998), and tools for idea exploration (Erickson & Kellog, 2000). More recent developments concentrate on and advance notions such as embodied interaction (Dourish, 2001), tangible interaction (Fernaeus, Tholander, & Jonsson, 2008), and pervasive and ubiquitous interaction (Greenfield, 2006; Satyanarayanan, 2002).


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A way to interpret these efforts is to consider them as waves for departing from scientific ideals based on a modernist tradition. For instance, one such wave emphasizes a focus on shared/boundary rather than individual/local use and settings. Another wave signifies the shift from information-centric to an action-centric perspective on interaction. Both these and perhaps other ways of conceiving distributed organizing are more than likely to bring about new types of virtuality. Arguably, the distinct characteristic of these new virtualities is that they increasingly span across boundaries and fields of expertise, thus enriching intra- and interorganizational experience and shifting the focus toward technologically mediated boundary spanning practices. A more informative basis to address this challenge is the notion of boundary objects defined as ‘‘objects which have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation’’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393). The same authors qualify even further boundary objects as being ‘‘simultaneously concrete and abstract, specific and general, conventionalized and customized’’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 408). An equivalent connotation is provided by Bowker and Star (1999), who defined boundary objects as ‘‘objects that inhabit multiple contexts—all at the same time—whilst having both local and shared meaning’’ (p. 297). Since the introduction of the boundary object concept, research has matured in several different directions (Gasson, 2005), examining different types of boundary objects such as diagrams, drawings, and blueprints (Bechky, 2003; Henderson, 1999); Gantt and PERT charts in project-based work (Yakura, 2002); digital documents (Bossen, 2002; Brown & Duguid, 2000); and the role of boundary objects in micronegotiations in CAD (Henderson, 1999) and software development and HCI (John, Bass, Kazman, & Chen, 2004; Lutters & Seaman, 2004). Related research also points to the importance of understanding the context of a boundary object’s inception, its history, and surrounding negotiations, which constitute a necessary precursor for boundary objects to be intelligible to those in the receiving community of practice (Diggins & Tolmie, 2003; Lutters & Ackerman, 2002; Subrahmanian et al., 2003). Collectively, these efforts unfold a path toward and a new model for distributed organizing, which in turn necessitate novel information infrastructures.

2.2. Information Infrastructures for Distributed Collective Practicing In collaborative settings, practices are increasingly manifested either as online or off-line, with the two frequently being intertwined. On-line practices are typically abstract and boundary practices recognizable by all members of a virtual ensemble, thus intentionally detached from the partners’ local settings. Off-line practice is concrete and situated locally. It is also common to assume that what goes on online (in boundary settings) is ultimately implicated into a set of off-line activities meaningful to each collaborator’s local context. Thus, paraphrasing Barnes (2001), online as indeed off-line practices do not arise from the conscious orchestration of individual actions, but more often from social agents who constantly modify their habitual



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individual responses as they interact with each other and coordinate their efforts in order to sustain a shared practice (pp. 23–24). CSCW scholars have recognized the design challenges of such coordination and embarked in various efforts to address theoretical, engineering, or applications-oriented aspects of coordinative praxis (Carroll, Rosson, Convertino, & Ganoe, 2006; Schmidt, 2000, 2002; Schmidt et al., 2007). Nevertheless, with the advent of new virtualities such as social software, new forms of coordination are necessitated to understand the shift of boundaries that drive collective intelligence, innovation, and creative performance. As these boundary shifts become widely accepted, they tend to establish a totally new context or culture for distributed organizing. One means to cope with such shifts in boundaries is the notion of ‘‘common or shared information spaces’’ (CIS) introduced by Bannon and Bødker (1997) to characterize a category of computer-mediated environments designed to allow cooperating actors to perform their individual and collaborative activities. The rationale of CISs is that actors engaged in interdependent activities of work need to coordinate their tasks so as to accomplish a collective objective using shared repertoire of resources. Such coordination entails articulation work, which designates activities required to manage the distributed nature of cooperative work. Subsequent research attempted either to establish links with communities of practice (Bossen, 2002) or to qualify parameters of CIS in terms of concepts such intermediary objects (Boujut & Blanco, 2003) and boundary negotiating artifacts (Lee, 2007). All these efforts share the objective of analyzing information infrastructures for distributed organizing in relation to the shared assets of a cooperative ensemble and the meaning attributed to them by the actors. Nevertheless, in the majority of cases the focus is on single organizations, either public or private. The more demanding problem of crossing organizational boundaries is seldom or loosely addressed (Dewhurst & Cegarra Navarro, 2004). Recently, a special issue of the CSCW journal was devoted to the notion of information infrastructures for distributed collective practices. In their analysis of the relevant challenges, Turner et al. (2006) proposed two complementary interpretations of what online practice may be considered to be. One interpretation frames practices in the context of the interpersonal interactions taking place among members of a virtual team. Another interpretation conceives practice as relative to the context of work, and specifically the processes, tools, and artifacts used by virtual teams to accomplish cooperative tasks. As discussed next, the latter is more challenging but also relevant to the present work.

2.3. The Need for Distributed Collective Practice Toolkits Consolidation Our discussion thus far has attempted to unfold the multifaceted insights that the practice turn brings into HCI and the study of technology in novel contexts of use. From the broad range of relevant challenges, the present work concentrates on how elements of practice are embodied into and enacted through webs of


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intertwined online and off-line activities, processes, tools, and artifacts across different organizational settings. In this context, we are concerned with cross-organizational practices that occupy multiple constituencies through their online/boundary and off-line/local counterparts. Local practices are those in which individual members become engaged in as part of carrying out daily work or private activities. Boundary practices concern activities and objects of work that transcend social worlds (i.e., intra- or interorganizational boundaries) and frequently give substance to new joint fields or competencies (Levina & Vaast, 2005). In contrast to local practices, which are highly institutionalized and concrete, boundary practice is more abstract and emergent in the sense that it is the collective product of the agents’ coengagement to a shared cause. In the course of such engagement, the boundary spanning practice partially transforms the agents’ local practices so as to accommodate the interests of their counterparts as revealed in the virtual space. In turn, it is local activities that at any one time shape and assign value to the boundary practice. Thus, coengagement takes the form of social accomplishment that emerges in practice as a result of intertwining online and off-line activities. It follows, therefore, that activities with online (boundary) artifacts are not sufficient to make sense of a collaborative situation, unless off-line (local) work is fed back to the online context. Apparently, this subtle requirement cannot be adequately facilitated by conventional collaborative frameworks where offline conduct is not (typically) a prerequisite for collaboration or is not fed back to the online situation (as in the case of virtual writing, MUDs, CVS systems for collaborative programming, and most social networking cites available today). Responding to this shortcoming, the present work develops a proposal for distributed collective practice toolkits. Requirements for Distributed Collective Practice Toolkits Distributed collective practice toolkits (or practice toolkits) form the means for bridging across boundary and local practices in a graceful manner to facilitate recurrent engagement in a linguistic domain leading to acts of communication. They are distinctively characterized by certain functional and nonfunctional requirements. Functional requirements designate the toolkit’s intended scope and focus on processes and artifacts facilitating coengagement in a shared practice. Nonfunctional requirements are concerned with desirable quality attributes. In terms of functional scope, the first requirement of a distributed collective practice toolkit is to provide the means (or the information infrastructure) for a virtual ensemble to recurrently coengage in emergent distributed activities. This is quite different and distinct orientation compared to other types of toolkits in computer science, which are intended to facilitate performance-oriented targets or foster reuse (as in the case of graphical user interface development toolkits) or compliance to standards (as in the case of existing collaboration and e-business systems). As for distributed activities, these are conceived as coordinated social accomplishments by geographically dispersed members with complementary or competing competencies but different local practices.



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This brings to the surface the second requirement for practice toolkits, which is the need to adhere to a practice-oriented vocabulary (existing or new). In general, a practice vocabulary consists of primitive elements, which can be assembled into meaningful collaborative artifacts of various types using structures (i.e., rules) inscribed in technology. One category of artifacts specifies properties of the result of individual contributions (e.g., product models, standards, drawings, visual encodings, style sheets, etc.). Another category of assembled artifacts may detail interdependencies of tasks or objects in a cooperative work setting (e.g., organizational charts, classification schemes, taxonomies, groupware tools, etc.). Yet another category may comprise artifacts that specify a protocol of interaction in the light of task interdependencies in a cooperative work setting (e.g., production processes and workflows, schedules, office procedures, bug report forms). It is important to note that practice vocabularies are designed and inscribed into a toolkit so that manipulation of shared objects and collective artifacts of practice lead to acts of communication. The third requirement is that practice toolkits should allow graceful translation of the virtual, which is recognizable and accountable by all members, to the local setting of different members, and vice versa. One way to approach this translation is to conceive collaborative practice through activities that may occupy multiple constituencies—the boundary (online) that characterizes the entire collaborative setting and guides the members’ contributions and participation and the local (off-line) that is situated and constructed through the collaborators’ own procedures and dedicated technological tools. Then the design challenge amounts to making provisions for minimum interoperability between the boundary and the local constituents of practice. The aforementioned motivate certain quality attributes such as abstraction, plasticity, mutual awareness, and social translucence, which become key design targets for a distributed collective practice toolkit. Abstraction is needed to allow artifacts of a designated practice vocabulary to exhibit multiple views for sense making and interpretation as they cross boundaries of different social worlds. Plasticity makes these artifacts adaptable and tailorable in use, thus useful to members of the virtual ensemble. Awareness is required to enhance the capability of making sense of another person’s actions on something, thus fostering mutual awareness of the members’ coengagement in practice and adjustment of their own lines of action. Finally, social translucence makes collaboration perceptually evident through social proxies that support work tasks while at the same time offering an overview of collective accomplishment.

3. RESEARCH CONTEXT, FOCUS, AND APPROACH In the course of recent R&D work (see the acknowledgments) we have investigated different application domains to assess the type and range of boundary spanning practices enacted, transmitted, and facilitated in virtual and off-line settings. The basic hypothesis underlying this effort is that distributed collective practicing to attain


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collective goals is facilitated by engaging in and enacting micropractices subsuming the manipulation of boundary artifacts. The term ‘‘micropractice’’ refers to the shared language constructs and artifacts inscribed in a technology through which a virtual team undertakes joint work in a collaborative setting. Such micropractices allow collaborators to operate in linguistic domains, which in turn define the common ground for joint action. As collaborators may belong to different professions, institutions, and organizational units, the micropractice and its subsuming activities constitute boundary artifacts common enough to be recognizable in different social worlds (professional communities) and plastic enough to facilitate sense-making and local interpretation. We use the term ‘‘distributed collective practice toolkit’’ or ‘‘practice-oriented toolkit’’ to refer collectively to the computational embodiment of such domainspecific micropractices and the way in which they are enacted, transmitted, and interactively manifested by boundary-spanning virtual groups. In another words, practice toolkits are conceived of as artificial languages for engaging in the practice the community is about. Consequently, the prime research objective of the current work is to conceptualize the constituents of practice toolkits and inform their design.

3.1. Research Questions A useful metaphor to understand practice toolkits as means for engaging in practice is language, which offers a means for communication. To this effect, one could formulate a conception of practice toolkits around notions such as semantics, syntax and lexical details. Nevertheless, there is one striking difference. Whereas for communicative practices a common language is necessary and sufficient to ensure sense making, in virtual settings this is not the case. For instance, two remote collaborators may be using different tools to make sense of each other’s intentions. Consequently, given the digital medium, practice toolkits should be designed to facilitate the members’ operation in ‘‘linguistic domains.’’ In practical terms this implies facilitation of recurrent interactions between members that lead to an act of communication. Following this path, a number of specific research questions stand out very promptly:

What is the vocabulary for recurrent interactions that lead to an act of communication in virtual settings? How can such a vocabulary be interactively manifested through boundary objects? How is ‘‘practice’’ framed in boundary spanning virtual communities of practice? How is such practice encoded, enacted, and transmitted through practice toolkits? To what extent can practice toolkits foster and enable change (in practices) rather than reconstructions of existing well-established practices?

From these points, it follows that our aim is not to advance the theoretical thinking behind virtual communities of practice so much as to contribute to the


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debate regarding the engineering ground and the type of tools needed to facilitate the members’ engagement in the practice the community is about.


3.2. Methodology and Research Methods Two case studies were designed and carried out in different practice domains to investigate collaborative engagement in music interpretation exercises and the assembly of information-based products such as vacation packages for tourists. Music interpretation exercises would provide insights to the online reconstruction of widely accepted practices based on established music notation constructs. Vacation package assembly was conceived as a case for cross-organizational collaboration in new product development. In both cases, we were confronted with the challenge of designing for skillful praxis, which required an explicit effort to make sense of what is being done across sites in a collaborative information space. Phrased differently, the choice of methodological instrument should bring to the forefront the analytic distinction between technology as artifact (i.e., a technology’s artifactual character) and technology use in practice. Such an orientation is evident in Orlikowski’s (2000) practice lens. According to the practice lens, technologies can be seen as prerequisites for particular outcomes but the existence of prerequisites does not determine the outcome. Thus, through technology used in practice, new social formations may arise that were not initially foreseen during the development of the technology. This perspective brought to the context of virtual communities of practice suggests a clear separation between prerequisites and outcomes. Specifically, it leads to a conception of online communities as emergent structures that evolve and sustain momentum on the Internet. Phrased differently, virtual communities cannot be treated as embodied in technology. Instead, what is embodied in a technology is a particular set of symbols and material properties allowing for social connectivity. Then, virtual communities emerge when such social connectivity is instantiated in practice. It is worth noticing that today social connectivity can hardly be conceived in terms of functional qualities or requirements. Instead, it appears to be a nonfunctional quality attribute to be satisficed rather than fulfilled. With regards to outcomes, the practice lens suggests a focus on artifacts and their material properties. For our purposes this translates to a commitment to online ‘‘tells’’ or electronic remains that reveal the community’s existence and provide insights to its practice. It is common to coin such tells and remains as cultural artifacts because they result from and embody the community’s shared values. In terms of their material properties, cultural artifacts are bits of program code and data, which can only be made sense of using dedicated software. Thus, the cultural artifacts of a virtual community are inextricably linked with the software toolkits through which such artifacts are instantiated in practice, become negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed by community members. Following the aforementioned we devised a common methodology for both cases, which was executed in three steps, namely, exploratory data collection (emphasizing artifacts in use and their information-processing properties), development

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of practice toolkits (as prerequisites for recurrent online engagement in practice), and finally assessment and evaluation of each toolkit. Next we sketch these steps, whereas a more elaborate account is provided in the following section where each case is presented in detail.


Exploratory Step This step aimed to collect qualitative data and insights into each practice and how it is performed, using surveys, onsite visits, and interviews with expert practitioners. Scenarios in the form of narrative descriptions of envisioned contexts of use were also devised to solicit requirements and record the participants’ perspectives and points of view. In both cases, scenarios were drafted and circulated to participants prior to conducting interviews. Further details of the data collected are presented in the description of each case study in the following section. Figure 1 summarizes the approach to organizing and conducting interviews across the two cases. Designing Practice Toolkits Design of the practice toolkits in each case was conducted as an iterative prototyping exercise informed by the qualitative results of the exploratory step, cognitive walkthrough, and experts’ feedback. Although the practice domains were different, the design of the respective toolkits shares common ground. First, both toolkits were devised as downloadable software suites made available to authorized users upon registration to a community support system (see next). Second, the toolkits were the only means for engaging in the designated practices online. Third, both toolkits would implement a small number of boundary artifacts revealed through the exploratory step to facilitate cross-site (synchronous and asynchronous) collaboration. Fourth, both toolkits were implemented using Swing and Java-based components and APIs, suitably extended or crafted from scratch, to facilitate dedicated functions. Finally, both toolkits were developed so as to interoperate with an augmented version of the Liferay Content Management System and application server, which provided the basic components for building the community support functions, that is, electronic registration, virtual presence, access to shared data, asynchronous notification services, and so on. FIGURE 1. Interviewing strategy for data collection. Music Lessons Soliciting participants Participant affiliations No. of interviews Type of interview Duration of interview Interviewing period

Vacation Package Assembly

Scenario description to set Scenario description to set the context; Onsite visits the context; Focus group Music tutors, music performers, Tour operators, travel agencies, music composers and service providers 58 11 Semistructured/individual interviews 30–45 min 4 months


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Assessment and Evaluation The two toolkits have been thoroughly evaluated in separate settings using different techniques. Details of the evaluation of the music performance toolkit are reported in Alexandraki and Valsamakis (2009) and Alexandraki and Akoumianakis (2010). The vacation package assembly evaluation is elaborated in Akoumianakis (2010) and Akoumianakis et al. (2011). Here we provide only a brief description of these studies in terms of objective evaluation approach and key findings. The evaluation scenario for the music performance toolkit was a music interpretation lesson over the Internet. The experiment was remarkably challenging, as teaching music interpretation requires communication through multiple communication channels (i.e., hearing, vision, and movement). However, the key objective of the assessment in terms of practiceoriented behavior was, apart from evaluating the efficiency of the implemented toolkit, to further explore how online practices can affect local off-line performance and vice versa. The vacation package assembly toolkit was assessed through virtual ethnographic studies and follow-up focus workshops. Virtual ethnographies were organized around specific vacation packages with the researchers becoming active participants as moderators of the virtual ensemble.

4. CASE STUDIES The two case studies have been conducted in the context of separate interdisciplinary R&D projects (see the acknowledgment). The authors were involved as principal investigators.

4.1. Online Music Interpretation Lessons This case study was carried out in the context of the DIAMOUSES project (Alexandraki & Akoumianakis, 2010). DIAMOUSES virtual communities are distributed teams jointly attaining a common goal such as music rehearsals or improvisations, live performances in the presence of a remote audience, and distributed master classes. Our case study relates to the conduct of a music interpretation lesson. A music interpretation lesson in DIAMOUSES is organized as a coengaged practice between geographically dispersed members of a learning community comprising one tutor/moderator and several students, each performing a different instrument. The learning objective amounts to interpreting and negotiating music scores so as to perform the music either individually or collectively. Methods The general methodology to analyze networked music performance practices, elicit requirements, and define specifications employed various instruments (for details, see Alexandraki & Akoumianakis, 2010). For the music interpretation lesson

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scenario, which was more demanding in terms of collaborative practicing, two external music tutors assessed initial design concepts and prototypes in the course of cognitive walkthrough sessions (Akoumianakis, Vellis, Milolidakis, Kotsalis, & Alexandraki, 2008). Five (3 C 2) separate and independent cognitive walkthrough sessions were organized with the two experts, respectively. They were conducted in the laboratory and involved early prototypes. Prior to the walkthroughs, experts had been informed about the aims and objectives of the exercise but had no exposure to the prototypes used. The Music Interpretation Toolkit Qualitative analysis of data (Akoumianakis et al., 2008) revealed several key requirements for conducting a music interpretation lesson as a distributed collective practice. Specifically, it confirmed the boundary function of the music score and the need for a suitable online representation to enable participants to reach common ground as well as to guide individual off-line performance with music instruments. It also led to a classification of practice based on what collaborators actually do. Thus, a music notation lesson comprises asynchronous preparatory activities, synchronous coengagement in practice, and off-line praxis with music instruments. As these are distinct, different component tools have been designed to support them. Community-oriented/asynchronous tasks are hosted by a web portal based on a suitably customized version of the Liferay Content Management System. Access to the contents is role based. Teachers and students are two roles relevant to the conduct of music lessons. They are entitled to download application suites that allow them to take part in music lessons. Access to these tools presupposes successful registration using an electronic registration system developed on top of the basic Liferay registration mechanism. A dedicated portlet has also been developed to host shared materials of music lessons and to provide a reference point for scheduling synchronous sessions. To take part in a music lesson, members of the learning community must be registered to the corresponding Liferay community. Registered members have access to the corresponding room consolidating past and current activities of the music class and can download the practice-oriented toolkit. An instance of this application is depicted in Figure 2. The main container is a tab pane. The first tab component provides access to a virtual space for collective practicing (i.e., rehearsing a piece of music). Here participants become coengaged in music performance. Subsequent tabs allow for tutor–learner communication and collaboration. These tabs are designed to facilitate execution of tasks in private and public interaction spaces. In terms of the user’s private information space, this is constituted by several tasks. Visual contact with remote peers is achieved through a network camera (top-left area on the diagram). Each peer can control parameters related to the remote user’s performance (i.e., the volume of the signal received from a remote site) by using the faders at the bottom center. Peers can also manipulate shared multimedia resources (bottom-right tabbed pane) made available by the tutor through the lesson’s room portlet in the portal. The public space reproduces the boundary artifacts and activates allowable actions during


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FIGURE 2. The practice-toolkit for synchronous music lessons.

a synchronous session. The music score is a shared object, uploaded from the lesson’s Liferay room. It is developed using a custom extension of the JMusic API and acts as the referent object for all coordinative practices. In synchronous sessions the object is replicated across the connected clients and remains synchronized at all times. A floor manager coordinates remote users’ access to this object. It is worth noticing that students access their own score corresponding to the local musical instrument. Coordinative Artifacts: The Metronome and the Floor Manager. The metronome and the floor manager are two artifacts intended to facilitate coordination in virtual settings. The metronome is needed to keep a common tempo among performers in the context of a music lesson. Our domain analysis revealed that this metronome should have a visual manifestation and support basic functions such as those depicted in Figure 3. Because in the DIAMOUSES framework music is communicated either as digital audio signals or as MIDI messages, the metronome supports such selection (Figure 3a). All collaborators should have the same settings with respect to the tempo and rhythm of the music performed. Changes to the settings of the metronome (see Figure 3b) are done in a coordinated manner following access permission. Once these settings are changed all collaborators obtain the new settings (Figure 3c). Finally, it is worth mentioning that in contrast with other shared objects, the metronome is extremely sensitive to time offsets. As a result, the beat

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FIGURE 3. The DIAMOUSES metronome. (Color figure available online.)

of the metronome is not activated locally but transmitted to all clients through the network, along with the music signals representing the performance of individual peers. In addition to the metronome, online practices subsuming activities in the public information space are coordinated by a floor manager, which undertakes permission assignments to the shared score. Typical floor management functions such as request/release floor are implemented through explicit function activation controls (see Figure 4). Boundary Artifacts and Practices: Musical Score and Its Manipulation. The basic boundary object of coordinative practices is the shared music score, which is recognizable by every member and meaningful ‘‘locally,’’ as its interpretation is subject to the musical instrument. During a synchronous session, performers maintain their own replica of the score corresponding to the expected performance of the specific instrument. A user in possession of the floor can manipulate elements of the replicated musical score using the toolbar above the shared object. Thus, it is possible to delete/add notes, add rest, change of tempo, clear music score (i.e., delete all notes), and so on. Some of these tasks, such as the manipulation of the duration and the pitch of a note as well as replacing a note with a rest, can also be carried out by direct manipulation. For instance, selecting and dragging a note in a horizontal dimension changes its duration while dragging it in the vertical dimension changes its pitch. Tasks such as deletion of a note, repetition of a note, and turning a note into a rest can be carried out using a context sensitive pop-up menu (see Figure 5). Such tasks trigger a synchronization mechanism that broadcasts changes and updates to the shared object across all clients. In addition to the preceding, a few instruction-based coordinative tasks have been implemented to guide the users’ off-line performance with an instrument. For FIGURE 4. Floor manager’s activation and states.


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FIGURE 5. Pop-up menu for manipulating score elements.

instance, annotation is a common practice in document-based collaboration. The user can select a specific part of the music score and add an annotation (see Figure 6). The annotation container is a custom dialog, which allows the user to assign a persistent comment or instruction to the chosen object. Another popular practice is to mark/unmark parts of the music score to highlight aggregate music expressions (i.e., chords, phrases) as in Figure 7. Lessons Learned, Practice, and Experience Using the toolkit, several evaluation scenarios have been designed and executed to assess both technical aspects of the toolkit as well as the collaborative performance of peers. The details of these evaluations have recently been presented elsewhere (Alexandraki & Akoumianakis, 2010; Alexandraki & Valsamakis, 2009). A FIGURE 6. Enacting annotations.

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FIGURE 7. Pop-up menu in state of marking. (Color figure available online.)

retrospective analysis of these experiences has revealed two key issues standing out very prominently, as challenges for designing practice toolkits.

First, our toolkit reproduces online the basic vocabulary of the linguistic domain of music performance (i.e., notational symbols such as notes, score, melodies, and the valid patterns of use). This reproduction, however, does not change the referent linguistic domain and its ontological elements and symbols. Rather, it affects the way in which designated practices (facilitated by such symbols) are transmitted, communicated, and perceived. Extending the linguistic domain of music performance would require the creation of new objects or cultural artifacts (in the vocabulary of the linguistic domain) and associated activities or patterns of use. Examples of such possible enhancements are increasingly being reported in the relevant literature on new music research (Hajdu & Didkovsky, 2009). Second, the current implementation of the toolkit is such that intertwining between online practice and off-line (local) performance is controlled by the implemented boundary object (i.e., the shared music score and its constituent parts) and social interaction in the form of graphical manipulations or verbal queues expressed either orally or textually (i.e., go back and forth, focus on specific phrases, etc.). Nevertheless, the boundary artifact is not sensitive to contextual information characterizing local off-line performance at remote sites. Consequently, enactment of designated actions locally may lead to variable performance and this variation may be important. For instance, correct musical performance is still possible using suboptimal local practices (i.e., erroneous or ineffective placement of fingers on the instrument). One possible improvement in this direction, revealed through evaluation, is score following that provides a desirable contextual enhancement for making sense of local practice.

4.2. Vacation Package Assembly: A New Boundary-Spanning Practice The second case study relates to assembling information-based products such as vacation packages and was carried out in the context of the eKoNES project (see the


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acknowledgments). eKoNES sought to extend state-of-the-art e-business solutions in tourism, such as dynamic packaging, to address novel aspects in boundary-spanning collaboration in cross-organizational community settings. To this effect, the project investigated novel engineering concepts such as flexible product assembly lines in which social connectivity, plasticity, and tailoring are inherent properties of both the production process (i.e., the assembly line) as well as the ultimate information-based product and the way in which it is negotiated and constructed.


Methods A qualitative survey was conducted to elicit insights on both current and envisioned practices in building vacation packages and to provide a context for design. The survey was directed to tour operators, travel agencies, and regional service providers. Exploratory data collection was conducted through on-site visits and interviews with the aforementioned target user communities. Whenever possible, we also used documented codes of practice in the tourism industry, that is, ‘‘Tour Operators Initiative,’’ to complement findings on-site. As our intention was to improve upon the current situation, data collection methods were designed so as to facilitate envisioning of new (improved) practices. These were contextualized through various techniques such as partitioned narratives, scenarios, and rapid prototyping, thus establishing the design context for the vacation package assembly toolkit (Akoumianakis, 2010). The Vacation Package Assembly Toolkit The vacation package assembly toolkit was designed to support the artifacts of vacation package assembly as summarized in Figure 8 in terms of key workflows, subsuming activities, and their assignment to lifecycle stages of the corresponding cross organizational virtual community of practice or electronic squad. It is precisely such a design focus that distinguishes our toolkit from other (generic) e-business solutions in tourism. Specifically, the toolkit should support a virtual ensemble (i.e., representatives of tourism service providers who register their offerings in shared pool and devote resources to a collective objective and consumers whose participation is motivated by individual goals and requirements) to recurrently engage in the process of assembling vacation packages. Such recurrent engagement requires operations that transcend across internal (to the alliance) and external boundaries. Transcending Interorganization Boundaries: Elastic Buttons and Tailorable Activity Panels. To provide a shared context for collaboration, a design language (or vocabulary) was devised to represent vacation packages and their constituent parts. The key idea is that vacation packages are collective offerings comprising primitive services offered by different organizations. As such services may be offered by different candidate suppliers, the ultimate choice of service offering is to be

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FIGURE 8. Package development workflows versus squad lifecycle stages.

determined by customers so as to suit their own preferences and constraints. Thus, the vacation package practice vocabulary is required to make provisions for representing graphically not only the ultimate package but also variations suit to different users. To allow for such flexibility, our vocabulary was organized around three design concepts, namely, (a) the package as a container object, (b) the basic composition units of a package (i.e., days) and the individual activities or neighborhood offerings scheduled within a day, and (c) spatial semantics and temporal constraints (i.e., containment, overlap, etc.) between individual activities. Design deliberations led to the incremental refinement of each concept, both in terms of interactive behavior and information-processing properties. Specifically, elastic buttons were used to establish an abstraction for representing neighborhood offerings. Figure 9 depicts some representative examples of elastic buttons. As shown, their physical properties and visual appearance are different from a conventional two-state button. Specifically, their color designates neighborhood type, whereas labels and icons designate some of their features. Also, the underlying dialog model is minimally changed to allow an elastic button to be resized in two directions. The rationale for such components results from the need to be able to manipulate a suitable interaction object class whose physical properties can be augmented to derive the required semantic meaning. Due to technical reasons, it was chosen to consider activity objects as customized buttons (with a label, color, and size manipulation) that inherit the two-state dialogue model of an abstract button. As these ‘‘buttons’’ would represent neighborhood offerings, additional semantic notions should be allowed. For example, distinct types of neighborhood offerings could be made explicit by allowing manipulation of a suitable physical property (i.e., color).


FIGURE 9. Examples of elastic buttons. (a) Activities in a single day. (b) Activity spanning across consecutive days. (c) Synchronous collaborative rendering of an activity with interim feedback.

(a)

(b)

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Similarly, as activities have duration, elastic buttons afford size manipulation. Nested icons are social proxies conveying context-related information. Elastic buttons, although distinctively recognizable, obtain additional meaning when collated in a container object type. Specifically, tailorable activity panels provide a means for representing an entire package by laying out graphically collections of elastic buttons. In general, an activity panel is used to organize neighborhood offerings (i.e., elastic buttons) in a particular layout. We have constructed two concrete examples of alternative layouts to represent role-specific views of a vacation package. One layout (top instance in Figure 10) provides the moderator’s view of the vacation package concentrating on neighborhoods and their relative organization. In this FIGURE 10. Alternative activity panels.

(continued )


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FIGURE 10. (Continued ).

layout, activities scheduled for a particular day constitute horizontal cross-sections in the panel layout. On the other hand, the squad members’ layout (bottom instance in Figure 10) depicts the vacation package as a sequence of days with activities presented through vertical cross-sections of the panel layout. Whereas this latter layout is the only option for squad members, the moderator may choose layout view interchangeably depending on the task at hand. One difference worth noticing is the representation of activities spanning across several days. In the moderator’s view these are represented by a single/continuous elastic button, whereas in the squad members’ view they are populated as a series of elastic buttons with boundary indication of continuity across days. As these packages are the result of collective contributions and negotiation of details, there was an explicit need to support mutual awareness during collaborative praxis on shared objects. This required various enhancements the detailed description of which is beyond the scope of this article. However, to illustrate the concept, Figure 11 presents examples of collaborative practicing in a synchronous session. The examples assume that the moderator (left screen) is the holder of the floor, thus the initiator of the collaborative tasks. The screen on the right depicts the effects of the initiator’s on the collaborating partner’s user interface. For purposes of illustration, we have

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FIGURE 11. Collaboration patterns in synchronous sessions.



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annotated the screens so as to describe start/end conditions for the collaborative interactions. Boundary Artifacts in the Customers’ Social World. Thus far we have examined how vacation packages and their constituents span internal boundaries of an electronic squad. Nevertheless, the same objects once constructed, negotiated, and agreed, should be reassembled so as to cross the boundary between the electronic squad and the customer base. To facilitate such crossing the assembly line undertakes to translate vacation packages in a language meaningful to the end users. We have developed several dedicated presentation vocabularies to facilitate such boundary crossing. Figure 12 illustrates two different translations into a portlet context allowing prospective users to consider making a personalized reservation. The example on the right-hand side was devised to facilitate richer social interactions between members of the user community. Through these portlets, end users may explore variations of the package and feedback their request to the virtual workgroup, thus generating new cycles of meta-negotiations. Another type of translation is devised for mobile contexts of use reflecting the situation where a user consumes services of a package. Figure 13 depicts this transformation for a PDA context. As shown, in-vacation users may obtain an overview of package arrangements, rank services, identify neighbors, and locate them on the map. Collectively, such data (i.e., micronegotiations prior to making a reservation, or feedback while in vacation) constitute valuable input for the electronic squad. Evaluating the Vacation Package Assembly Toolkit The vacation package assembly toolkit was evaluated thoroughly using formative assessments and virtual ethnographic studies of operating squads (Akoumianakis, 2010). Since then, we have conducted three additional virtual ethnographies around specific vacation packages with variation in focus (i.e., cruising package, conference participation combined with vacation, and cultural excursion) to ensure engagement of different cross-functional virtual squads (Akoumianakis et al., 2011). In all cases the researcher was involved as moderator of the electronic squads, whereas each ethnographic study was followed up by a workshop to present and clarify the data collected. These experiences provided useful insights into the actual use of the toolkit, but more important they revealed several interesting observations, not foreseen when designing the toolkit:

First, it became evident that partners appropriating the benefits of virtual networking are fewer than originally expected, of a certain type and profile. Their perceptions of the toolkit differ widely, whereas they are now using other social networking sites for online collaboration, direct marketing, and customer relationship management. Second, an unintended consequence of using the toolkit is that cross-sector cliques appear to dominate vacation packages (i.e., customers visiting a cultural

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FIGURE 12. Vacation packages assembled and published.



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FIGURE 13. The vacation package on PDA. (Color figure available online.)

site tend to dine in a specific tavern, use the same transportation medium, choose the same accommodation, etc.). Finally, customers who have consumed the same or similar vacation packages maintain togetherness after vacation. In a way, they appear to have established persistent microcommunities with members maintaining contact, both off-line and online, while recurrently coengaging in certain practices using different social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and TripIt.

5. CROSS-CASE ANALYSIS Having reviewed the two case studies, this section provides an experiencebased reflection aiming to provide answers to the research questions relevant to the present work. Our discussion builds upon postexperiment interviews with subjects engaged in the evaluation experiments. All interviews had a standard format derived by drawing upon Orlikowski’s practice lens and the analytic separation between prerequisites and outcomes. We considered as prerequisite the social connectivity enabled by the practice toolkits, whereas as outcomes we conceived the ‘‘traceable’’ actions and the virtual ‘‘tells’’ of the respective communities. This led to a distinction between community management functions and practice-oriented inscriptions in each toolkit. Community management functions include registration, profile building, information sharing, asynchronous communication exchanges, and so on. Practice management refers to the repertoire of resources available for contributing to a mission or practice agenda (i.e., music lessons or vacation package development). For practice management our interest was to devise a suitable unit for ‘‘framing’’ elements of practice in virtual settings, thus explaining how the shared space is conceived by collaborators, what fosters making of sense, and how practice is revealed in virtual settings. In turn, for community management our aim is to assess the extent to which virtual ensembles, once formed, sustain their momentum and persist across

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FIGURE 14. Interview topics. Community Management Community types & technology inscriptions


Appropriated versus enacted structures & implications Motive for recurrent participation (in communities) Online community practice versus members’ off-line activities

Practice Engagement Means for understanding the shared practice Making sense of what is expected in virtual settings Social awareness of what peers are doing in virtual setting Alignment between online and off-line practice Online practice reification and materiality

different practice agendas. Phrased differently, we sought to understand recurrent behavior, that is, the degree to which members continue their coengagement across different music lessons and vacation packages. Such recurrent behavior, if observed, would indicate not only strength in social ties but also habitual patterns of behavior (i.e., cliques in the vacation package assembly or performer preference in the music lesson), which can be attributed only to the designated practice and the way it is enacted. In light of this, Figure 14 summarizes the questions raised during the interviews. It is important to note that our interview questions are biased to understanding ‘‘community’’ through the designated practices facilitated by the practice toolkits at hand. In other words, we consider community as emergent rather than preexisting structure and seek to understand how it relates to the practices embodied or fostered by the practice toolkits.

5.1. Practice-Based Insights A key finding resulting from the responses to the questions ‘‘Means for understanding the shared practice’’ and ‘‘Making sense of what is expected’’ in Figure 14 was that users in all cases conceived the respective practice agendas in terms of designated cultural artifacts. Cultural artifacts were broadly defined as the material aspects/remains of technology that reveal individual or collective activity taking place prior, during, or following the execution of a practice agenda. Respondents confirmed that (a) participation and engagement in practice is only possible through (and synonymous to) recurrent interactions with cultural artifacts that form the linguistic vocabularies of practice and (b) it is through the members’ coengagement in such linguistic vocabularies that knowledge emerges either as ‘‘knowing in practice’’ or as communication acts. In the music lesson scenario, participants identified two cultural artifacts, namely, the representation of music using the score and the outcome of the distributed collective practice of the group. The music score, as means for representing music,


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qualifies as cultural artifact for different reasons (indicated by participants in order of preference):


‘‘The score is a human-made object, which gives information about the culture of its creator’’ — Extract from interview ‘‘[The music score] forms a type of language for music with widely shared meaning, allowing not only description, but also re-creation of a musical piece’’ — Extract from interview ‘‘Meaning resides within the score and takes the form of melody, harmony, the interrelationship of melody and harmony, the overall form or structure of the piece and in vocal music, some sort of relationship of the lyrics to these other elements’’ — Extract from interview

Further insights to the role of the score during a music lesson were revealed by the responses to the questions on ‘‘Social awareness of what peers are doing’’ and ‘‘Alignment between online practice and off-line performance’’ (see Figure 14). Participants noticed the affordances designed into the shared music score and confirmed that they foster and facilitate shared meaning and collective sense of the common information space:

‘‘I could immediately deduce what I was expected to do and at the same time, I knew that I was not alone’’ — Extract from interviews

Interestingly, it was also noted that

‘‘: : : such meaning does not result from the communications facilities available, but it resides solely within the score’’ — Extract from interviews

Regarding the alignment between online practice and off-line performance, responses varied depending on participants’ role. Moderators recognized the partial support offered by the toolkit for ‘‘sensing’’ what is happening off-line at a remote site:

‘‘The use of camera and audio signal received do not suffice to fully assess the user’s performance or virtuosity. Score following could provide additional insight, but one would still need more targeted visual contact’’ — Position statement by moderator

Participant reflections implied similar shortcomings:

‘‘Every time I lost my step, I referred to the score to regain focus. This takes time because the score did not follow my performance’’ — Extract from interview

The aforementioned lead to the conclusion that the score, in addition to being a type of learning material, also serves as a boundary object intertwining between


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the online and the off-line setting, thus serving the purpose of structuring (and restructuring) unknown contexts and/or actions and assigning them with meaning. On the other hand, extensions in boundary function to align online practice with off-line performance turn out to be important and a critical enhancement in future versions of the toolkit. The second cultural artifact, which is socially constructed by the virtual ensemble, is the collective outcome of the group’s performance, that is, the recorded audio signal. This was established by analyzing responses to the question ‘‘How online practice is reified and obtains material properties.’’ Moderators and participants gave their own accounts:

‘‘[The recorded performance] is what remains as trace of the music interpretation lesson’’ — Participant ‘‘The recorded performance is a crystallized set of social and material relations: : : : It embodies both technical and material elements of practice in a single artifact that ‘works for’ and is ‘worked on’ by a host of people, ideologies, technologies and other social and material elements’’ — Moderator

It was also strongly argued that the recorded audio represents only a part of the group’s practice. Another important part relates to the history of coengagement leading to the recorded outcome:

‘‘[The recorded performance] does not sufficiently highlight the collaboration, the mistakes made, the justifications given, the virtuosity of individual performers, the stress unfolded during the lesson, the effectiveness of the moderator, the contents of the online chat’’ — Extract from interviews

It can therefore be concluded that the remains of a virtual music ensemble comprise on one hand, the dynamics of collaboration during the lesson and, on the other hand, the ‘‘packaged’’ outcome codified in popular audio formats (e.g., wav or mp3). The latter type of virtual ‘‘tells’’ can be easily reconstructed using tools of the current technological paradigm (i.e., music players and browsers), whereas the former type remains bytes of code until such time that it is reconstructed using only the practice toolkit through which it was initially constructed. In a similar vein, vacation packages were deemed as cultural artifacts. This by itself is not novel outcome, as there are many efforts reporting similar findings. For instance, Osti and colleagues (2009) identified several cultural characteristics as determinants of vacation search. Some of them include origin and cultural background of the tourist, involvement with traveling, perceived risks of taking the holiday or undertaking a particular activity, knowledge about the destination, and cost of vacation (p. 65). Our analysis confirms previous research and reveals additional factors qualifying vacation packages as cultural artifacts:

‘‘Choice of vacation destination appears to be strongly influenced by the way prospective tourists perceive their hosts and their culture. It seems that



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sometimes, previous established ideas and stereotypes, prevalent views on economic stability, safety and accessibility act as blinkers that determine tourists’ choice of destination.’’ ‘‘Vacation choice frequently reveals cultural identity in so far as it entails conscious decisions on specific type of packages (such as urban, green tourism, cruising vacation, short-break vacation, etc.), which may be further qualified by individualized travel plans.’’ ‘‘Type of service requested and consumed, irrespective of destination decisions, is also culturally determined.’’

In terms of the vacation package assembly practice all participants, irrespective of sectoral specialty, confirmed that it is the aggregate (abstract) package and the way it is incrementally transformed to alternative concrete offerings that form the common bond for collaboration. Some respondents qualified further their position statements as follows:

‘‘This could not have been otherwise as during vacation package assembly participants have no means to foresee the ultimate shaping of a package (i.e., what form it is going to take); this is solely determined by the customers’ purchasing behavior.’’ — Extract from interviews

As for the meaning of vacation packages across fields, all respondents admitted that vacation packages simultaneously exhibit locality and boundary function. Locality refers to the different implications abstract vacation packages bare upon individual partners as they are transformed to become concrete inscriptions into each partner’s material practices. For boundary function, participants provided two complementary interpretations. Representatives of large vacation establishments and tour operators coined vacation packages as conventional boundary objects, which typically cross boundaries of different communities of practice implicating different activities at different sites. According to this group:

‘‘The novelty of vacation packages as manifested in the virtual space, is that they provide a means for gracefully intertwining online (boundary) activities with off-line (local) tasks.’’ — Extract from interviews

The rest of the respondents understood the boundary function (and the novelty) of vacation package assembly as follows:

‘‘What is considered of paramount importance is that it [vacation package assembly] seems to be pushing our own competence boundaries, thus creating new capabilities.’’ — Extract from interviews

Respondents expressing this view also drew a distinction between traditional boundary objects and the artifacts of vacation package assembly in relation to plasticity:

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‘‘Traditional boundary objects assume that plasticity is a quality of the object which makes it capable of withstanding changes while being used. Vacation package assembly and the objects that make it up emphasize plasticity as a quality feature of the development process through which vacation packages are constructed.’’ — Extract from interviews

It can be argued that the latter perspective brings new insights to the study of boundary artifacts, whereas it shares common ground with the concept of boundary negotiating artifacts introduced in Lee (2007). Specifically, practice in cross-organization virtual alliances should no longer be conceived as the material work of business partners but as a continuum (or institutions) of intertwining activities taking place as much in the virtual as in the physical world. Respondents provided mixed statements to the questions ‘‘Alignment between online and off-line practices’’ and ‘‘Reification of practice and materiality’’ in vacation package assembly. Representatives of large vacation establishments expressed the opinion that they could have achieved the collective outcome by exploiting their own established professional links. Further analysis of these responses revealed a preconception of these partners as to the type and structural elements of the packages they had in mind. For instance, they confessed the following:

‘‘Vacation packages may not include the variety of options available by the virtual package assembly equivalents and it would not be as easy to accommodate customers’ requests for special services in a single offering.’’ — Extract from interviews

Despite the benefit of increased plasticity, which was acknowledged for packages compiled through the assembly line, they expressed strong preference for exercising higher control of the ultimate product they offer, at the expense of flexibility, especially when established liaisons with collaborators do not preexist. Contrasting this view, small and medium-sized partners and tour operators confirmed that they would not be able to compile products equivalent to the collective outcome of the alliance through existent work practices or by investing comparable amount of resources, for different reasons:

‘‘Small and medium-sized vacation establishments cannot be expected to possess the resources required to support such services.’’ — Extract from interviews ‘‘For tour operators the cost of the resulting services would be substantially higher as a result of the additional efforts required to cope with individualized requests.’’ — Extract from interviews

Interestingly enough, none of the participants reported as motives for sustained engagement either the need for establishing social ties with partners or the fact that someone else (i.e., a competitor, a peer, or colleague) was part of the alliance. This confirms results of earlier studies indicating that virtual collaboration to appropriate business benefits is not driven by imitating behavior or the need for socializing online.


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Our conclusion from the preceding is that it is important for informationbased products, such as those considered in our study, to exhibit the flexibility and plasticity required to allow customers to request personalized arrangements and individualized options. Being able to support such micronegotiations between customers and the virtual alliance as well as between members of the alliance has been the primary motif for both repeated customer requests for different vacation packages and recurrent participation of members in virtual alliances across different vacation package agendas.

5.2. Community Types and Management Both cases analyzed in the present study revealed community formation at two distinct and separate levels. One level is that of building and maintaining electronic neighborhoods (i.e., community as neighboring), whereas another level is that of facilitating practice-oriented coengagement (i.e., community as practicing). Participants also noticed that each type of community is fostered through different technological artifacts. Community as neighboring is facilitated through the Liferay portal. Community as practicing is enabled by the designated practice toolkits. In terms of technology constituting structures, community as neighboring exploits reuse of open source Liferay functionality to develop similar structures (i.e., electronic registration, new content development policies, access rights to informational assets including the practice toolkits and asynchronous communication services) across the two cases. Community as practicing is facilitated by interoperable software components constituting the dedicated practice toolkits. The specific structures inscribed in these toolkits, although different in function across the two cases, followed established software engineering quality attributes (Akoumianakis, 2009). For the music lesson toolkit, an open source third-party library, namely JMusic, was augmented to facilitate interactive exploration of the shared music score. In addition, a custom API was developed to allow interoperability between the user interface developed in Java Swing and the CCC code that handles real-time audio and video stream exchange. On the other hand, augmentation and expansion of Java Swing were the primary methods to create custom components for vacation package assembly such as the ‘‘elastic buttons’’ and the ‘‘tailorable activity panels.’’ The synchronous collaboration-oriented structures (i.e., session/floor management, replication, and object synchronization), inscribed to facilitate connectivity and awareness, were similar across the two cases and were built using an abstraction mechanism designed for this purpose. Collectively, these structures provided the means for building interactive embodiments of the respective linguistic domains. Turning to the issue of what is appropriated versus enacted (see Figure 14), Orlikowski (2000) drew the distinction by recalling that ‘‘existing structurational models of technology examine what people do with technologies in use, positing such use as an appropriation of the ‘structures’ inscribed in the technologies’’ (p. 407). Enactment is then introduced to emphasize a focus on emergent rather than embodied structures. Our content-based analysis of the respondents’ remarks on questions


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such as ‘‘Appropriated versus enacted structures and implications’’ and ‘‘Motive for recurrent participation (in other communities)’’ provides evidence to support a slightly different interpretation of enactment. Specifically, we observed that all communitysupporting functions embodied in the Liferay portal through design were conceived by users as appropriating structures inscribed in technology to serve solely ‘‘community as neighboring’’ practices such as formation, information sharing, and communicating. Respectively, the electronic neighborhood registration system, the custom information/content templates and the dedicated communication portlets were understood as components enabling these practices. Although the choice of embodied structures being appropriated at times may differ across users (i.e., some preferred e-mail, others SMS, and only moderators employed GroupSMS for asynchronous communication), there was consensus both on the scope of these structures and the exact steps for using them. Moreover, there was no confusion on members, resulting either from multiple identities, which was not inscribed, or the designated roles in the communities formed. Enactment was largely conceived as a mechanism associated with the practice toolkits. Specifically, two types of enactment were noted. The first relates to becoming copartners in practice, either music lessons or vacation package assembly. The second is a form of enactment grounded on what emerges as a result of the members’ recurrent coengagement in practice. Enactment as coengagement was revealed by the fact that the practice toolkits are the only means enabling emergent structures of the type ‘‘communities as practicing.’’ Enactment as collective praxis is revealed by the ‘‘packaged’’ outcome of cultivated virtual communities of practice. The emergent property of enactment is evident in the cultural artifacts produced by the respective communities and that cannot be foreseen in advance. For instance, a music lesson and the recorded audio output is emergent rather than predetermined outcome of the micronegotiations of the virtual team. Similarly, a vacation package emerges as a collective offering, but there is no guarantee that certain contributors, although registered and eligible, will actually be chosen by prospective customers. Our two case studies were also informative of some peripheral implications of enacting structures inscribed in technology. For instance, one case reported sharing of their recorded music lesson through a different social networking medium and using this medium to establish and sustain a virtual community. It was also reported that this had a positive implication, in the form of high interest expressed on the DIAMOUSES technology and tools. The vacation package case also confirmed similar emergent structures being formed and sustained outside the virtual space of eKoNES. This time, the driving force giving rise to these structures is choice of specific vacation arrangements in a package, which reveal ‘‘hidden’’ communities in the customer base and formation of ‘‘cliques’’ between business partners. It turns out that both these emergent structures implicate revisions in subsequent versions of a package. A final useful conclusion provided by our comparative study relates to how (i.e., through which artifacts) online practice is implicated in off-line activities and vice versa. The findings reestablished the critical role of cultural artifacts as boundary objects and confirmed that off-line practice is strongly intertwined but not fully



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determined by what happens online. In the music lesson case study, online practice and off-line (local) performances are intertwined through the shared music score and computer-mediated social interaction such as verbal queues expressed either orally or textually (i.e., go back and forth, focus on specific phrases, etc.). Nevertheless, the shared music score is not sensitive to contextual information characterizing local off-line performance at remote sites. In a similar vein, assembling vacation packages online influences but does not determine material practices of the members. This was evidenced through observing behavior of members of the virtual alliance and behavior of prospective customers. Of interest, there were deviations between what partners promised online and how such promises were decoded and translated to situated (local) practice. For instance, we identified cases where the promised service quality could not actually be delivered without this deviation being manifested to the respective electronic squad well in advance.

6. DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, AND CONCLUDING REMARKS 6.1. Revisiting the Research Questions In light of the two case studies and the cross case analysis presented in this article, we can now revisit the key research questions relevant to the present work, as follows:

Cultural artifacts as practice vocabularies. Cultural artifacts form the basic vocabulary for recurrent interactions leading to acts of communication in virtual settings. They are characterized by a dual role—on one hand, they structure unknown contexts and/or actions and assign them with meaning, and on the other hand, they serve to reconstruct a past practice, thus acting as virtual ‘‘tells’’ of an online experience. They may reproduce established concepts with well-defined meaning and properties or form new virtualities with novel affordances. Respectively, they should be designed with a focus to either enable improvements in enacting, transmitting, and processing established practices or enable change and thus facilitate enactment of new practices. Designing boundary objects and their practices. Practice-oriented design entails interactive manifestation of cultural artifacts through first-class boundary objects with designated information processing and interaction properties. In addition to functional specifications, boundary objects should exhibit nonfunctional qualities such as abstraction, plasticity, interoperability, and social translucence. Then, collaborative coengagement entails manipulating such boundary objects online and coping with their off-line implications in the local setting of a partner. Framing practice in boundary spanning virtual communities. Boundary spanning collaboration implies a new understanding of practice as a continuum of intertwined activities occupying online and off-line constituents. As a result, practice is

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framed as much in social interaction as in material processes, tools, and artifacts that shape and restructure it. For instance, the recorded audio performance of a music ensemble is informed by the history of interactions with the music score, whereas it obtains material properties only when the performer translates online contexts into specific off-line actions on a musical instrument. Similarly, vacation packages assembled online obtain material properties only when mapped to specific service offerings in the local (off-line) context of designated partners. Practice toolkits versus community management. It turns out that practice elements of a collaborative environment are sufficiently distinct and separate from the community management function. Consequently, they are best conceived as a dedicated component providing a virtual place for engaging in the practice the community is about. Such a functional separation has implications on the design of both constituent parts. Specifically, the scope of designing a communitysupport system should accommodate appropriate mechanisms to govern registration, role assignment, communication, information sharing, and exchange of codified knowledge. On the other hand, practice toolkits should be designed so as to provide a ‘‘protocol’’ for coengaging in practice. Design focus for practice toolkits. Framing practice in workflows, artifacts, and tools unfolds a design dilemma, which is seldom addressed. Specifically, should the practice toolkit reproduce online existing practices or foster new practices? Our case studies are illustrative of this dilemma and how it may influence design decisions. Our music master classes promote the view that the toolkit should encapsulate existing and established practices. Vacation package assembly postulates the design of the toolkit as new practice. Thus, it stands to argue that virtual communities of practice may be conceived either as facilitators or as boundary negotiating tools and thereby enablers of change. The latter case requires that the toolkit harmonizes institutionalized ‘‘local’’ practices of the members, which need not be compatible, by establishing a micropractice experienced only in virtual settings.

6.2. Practice Toolkits Versus Collaborative Management Information Systems The preceding discussion raises broader implications for designing collaborative information systems. Specifically, as businesses cooperate with other businesses to form interorganizational alliances, their supporting management information systems increasingly need to span across organizational borders. Information systems researchers approach such boundary crossing through adaptation (Majchrzak, Rice, Malhotra, King, & Sulin, 2000) or integration at various levels (Eckartz, Daneva, Wieringa, & van Hillegersberg, 2009; Volkoff, Strong, & Elmes, 2005). Practice toolkits foster a slightly different approach to business/organizational boundary crossing grounded on shortcomings of contemporary efforts to adapting or integrating components of management information systems.



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First, management information systems are designed for a known user community (i.e., a known type of user). As a result, they may not adapt gracefully to multiple social worlds, cross-functional teams, boundary-spanning domains, and emergent knowledge processes (Markus, Majchrzak, & Gasser, 2002, p. 185). In a similar vein, the HCI component of these systems has long claimed commitment to the principles of user-centered design. With practice toolkits, the focus is slightly different, as they promote designing for a boundary practice rather than a designated user community. Moreover, whereas boundary crossing through technology adaptation or integration has traditionally focused on portability, information connectivity and reuse as facilitated by a variety of groupware tools, practice toolkits pursue a perspective rooted in more challenging quality attributes such as abstraction, interoperability, social connectivity, and plasticity. Second, in contemporary management information systems, practice is seldom seen as dynamic and emergent institutions of activities. Rather, it is understood as appropriating the structures (i.e., standards, processes, repositories, groupware functions, etc.) and mechanisms (i.e., adaptation engines) designed into whatever technology is at hand. Partnerships are then built and sustained by adhering (i.e., integrating or adapting) to whatever is inscribed in the technology. As practice toolkits do not presuppose any prior configuration of community or inscriptions in technology, they are designed to foster partnerships through enactment rather than mere appropriation of structures. In other words, such partnerships emerge in practice without however being guaranteed before hand. Third, and building upon the previous argument, the assumption of practice as appropriating structures embodied in technology implies that practice is broadly contained within the management information system and the respective user community. Although this line of argumentation is the prominent stance in structurational models of technology, there are also arguments to suggest that practice is emergent and that it is practice (i.e., the activities themselves) that generates community, as it forms the ‘‘glue’’ that holds together a configuration of people, artifacts, and social relations (Gherardi, 2009, p. 121). This view is in line with practice toolkits where practice is not given but socially constructed, negotiated, and reconstructed using the toolkit. Then, this can explain emergent substructures such as cliques or microcommunities.

6.3. Concluding Remark and Future Work In conclusion, the present work points to a new direction for conducting practice-based design in HCI, with the emphasis being on the activities themselves that generate a community, rather than the community as preexistent structure. It is argued that this orientation offers a more informative theoretical base for analyzing and understanding existing and emerging phenomena in virtual settings. Consequently, it offers a protocol for proactive design of interfaces to community spaces. Nevertheless, it also raises crucial theoretical questions in relation to the empirical study of practice, necessitating further work and more elaborate accounts into how practices emerge, become established, and sustain community in the longer term.

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NOTES Acknowledgments. The present work was partially funded by General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Greek Ministry of Development in the context of projects eKoNES (KP-5) and DIAMOUSES (KP-24) of the Regional Operational Programme of Crete, Line 1.2 (Research and Development consortia in Strategic Priority Areas). Authors’ Present Addresses. Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Department of Applied Information Technology and Multimedia, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Estavromenos 710 04, Heraklion, Crete, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]. Chrisoula Alexandraki, Department of Music Technology & Acoustics, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Rethymnon Branch, E. Daskalaki 1 Str, Peribolia, 741 00 Retymnon, Crete, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]. HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received May 20, 2009. Revisions received July 27, 2010, and December 15, 2010. Final manuscript received January 17, 2011. Accepted by Lucy Suchman. — Editor

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