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Tinkering, Tailoring, & Mashing: The Social and Collaborative Practices of the Read-Write Web

At the 21st ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. San Diego, California, USA. 08-12 November, 2008.

Organizers: M. Cameron Jones, Elizabeth F. Churchill, & Michael B. Twidale

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in CSCW interested in discussing the human-centered, collaborative and creative aspects of web 2.0 and the current internet-based experience of creative social coding – mashups, the programmable web, remix culture, game modding, and copy-paste, and social programming. We invite researchers to ask: how are people sharing programming, tailoring, and modding knowledge on the internet and what are useful models of collaborative and social creativity? Some relevant topics and themes include:

• sharing, reusing, remixing, and recycling of electronic materials;
• web mashups, mashup creation, and mashup use;
• end-user customization and tailoring;
• collaborative debugging and problem-solving;
• loose collaboration;
• hackers, hacking culture, and the bazaar;
• notions of sharability and learnability;

Additionally, we also wish to revisit many theories and theoretical constructs which have long served CSCW, and evaluate them in light of contemporary and emerging practices on the web, including: “community” as both an interpretive lens and a unit of analysis; distributed cognition; activity theory; and social network analysis. How these theories relate to the daily practices of creative life online is not clear, especially what they may (or may not) tell us about issues of personal and group expression, passion, motivation, intention, and deep engagement.

Workshop contact and electronic submissions: M. Cameron Jones, mcjones@yahoo-inc.com

Submission Details:

Participants should submit research reports or researcher position statements, up to four pages in length, by email to mcjones@yahoo-inc.com no later than, September 19, 2008. Submissions should be formatted in standard ACM SIG-CHI long paper format and submitted in either Adobe PDF (.pdf) or Microsoft Word document format (.doc, or .docx).

Web Mash-ups and CSCW: Opportunities and Issues

At the 20th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 04-08 November, 2006.

Organizers: M. Cameron Jones & Michael B. Twidale

Proceedings available online: You can view the position statements of the workshop participants on the CSCW_2006_workshop_papers page.

More Details about the 2006 workshop: CSCW2006Workshop

Web mash-ups offer new ways to explore design spaces and to create very rapid innovative prototypes. They involve at least two kinds of collaborative work:

1. being a collaborative design activity themselves, as they draw on the work of others, and in some cases involve collaborative development in the style of open source software
2. providing a rapid prototyping platform for exploring and refining CSCW applications and components that are fast and cheap enough to develop to enable very rapid iterations and informal or participatory evaluations.

We believe that web mashups and related technologies are poised to fundamentally redefine CSCW, both in terms of user behavior and activities, and the ways in which researchers conduct research. The workshop will aim to address the following questions:

• What is special about mashups?
• How are they constructed?
• How come they are so effective for prototyping?
• To what extent is mashup creation a collaborative activity?
• What is the relationship between mashup development processes and those of open source development?
• How can mashups be used in prototyping and evaluating collaborative applications?

We shall create an opportunity in the morning session for those with systems development skills to learn about and to publicly develop a mashup, and for other workshop participants to observe the mashup development process. An analysis of that experience will lead into the afternoon session where we will map out the research topics that relate mashups and CSCW.