Does Distance Still Matter? Revisiting the CSCW Fundamentals on Distributed Collaboration

Описание: Does Distance Still Matter? Revisiting the CSCW Fundamentals on Distributed Collaboration
Pernille Bjorn, Morten Esbensen, Rasmus Eskild Jensen, Stina Matthiessen

Abstract:
Does distance still matter? Reporting on a comparative analysis of four ethnographic studies of global software development, this paper analyzes the fundamental aspects of distance as depicted in the famous paper ‘Distance matters’. The results suggest that – while common ground, collaboration readiness, and organizational management are still important aspects for distributed collaboration – the arguments concerning coupling of work and collaboration technology readiness need to be refined. We argue that in working remotely, closely coupled work tasks encourage the remote workers to spend the extra effort required in articulation of work to make the collaboration function. Also we find that people in distributed software development have already made collaborative technologies part of their work and individuals are comfortable with them, thus collaboration technology readiness takes a different shape in this setting.

ACM DL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=114...
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2670534