Paper:
Susan E. McGregor, Elizabeth Anne Watkins, and Kelly Caine. 2017. Would You Slack That? The Impact of Security and Privacy on Cooperative Newsroom Work. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 1, 2, Article 75 (November 2017), 22 pages.
Discussion Leader: Lee Lisle
Summary:
Journalists and other newsroom professionals often use different communication methods pursuant to the content they are conveying. The authors in this paper interviewed 12 active journalists in varying types and sizes of news companies to perform a grounded theory study on their communication patterns. Their analysis identified what kinds of choices are made when journalists need to collaborate or share information.
Through their interviews, the authors found that journalists will use asynchronous communication methods when they need to memorialize or otherwise keep a copy of what they are sharing in their records, while they use synchronous communication methods for brainstorming and sharing ideas.
The authors also leverage and combine 2 existing models to describe a journalist’s workflow. The first, Lee and Paine’s Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA) uses several dimensions to frame the context and usage patterns in collaborative work, while the second, Barreau and Nardi’s model of Personal Information Management (PIM) identifies a taxonomy for electric information storage. The authors combine these models to classify situations where journalists need to communicate with people.
In the interviews, each participant is asked how they would handle different collaborative situations. These would vary from accessing old work to handling private or sensitive information. After running through these scenarios, the interview would switch over to more specific communication methods to find out how the participants would use those. The interview script was included in the paper as an appendix.
The analysis and discussion of the interviews details the use cases for communication platforms. For example, if a user wanted to collaboratively generate a document or idea, they would use a synchronous style of communication. If that document needed some amount of security, they would avoid email and use some sort of encryption or privacy filter, such as through iMessage or face-to-face/telephone conversations that are harder to record (or difficult due to legalities).
Throughout, the authors used quotes from the interviews as backup for any claims they made. This provided the paper with concrete and direct evidence and elicited some user needs for future communication software developments.
Reflection:
I found this paper to be well written with a good analysis of the available data. In fact, I liked how the authors generalize their findings in the beginning and near the end of the paper, noting that these communication methods would only increase in usage in all sectors of business as people in the workforce started working remotely. Many of the points the journalists made on why they chose the communication method for a particular task would cause me to agree with them when considering my own workflow.
One particular finding that resonated was the use of email to memorialize a conversation or document. This kind of external memory technique allows the users to keep information somewhere that they can retrieve it quickly and destroy it when they need to.
It was interesting that the authors, ever cognizant of the security and privacy of their participants, strictly noted that they used encrypted communication methods to perform their interviews, as well as obeyed general IRB protocols. In a similar vein, the inclusion of their interview script was interesting in that they provided work that is often abstracted into a paper. I liked being able to read how one of the interviews would flow. Furthermore, the authors were upfront about the limitations of their analysis, noting that the their target user groups may not have been representative of the entire population.
However, I thought that the answers the journalists gave to some of the questions were too obvious, and that begs the question of whether this analysis was necessary? Since cataloging these choices and seeing how CSCW can assist with daily life is meaningful and noting which features are most useful in current situations, I believe this paper had just enough purpose. It does provide a framework for any future work in developing successors to Slack et al.
Questions:
- The authors note that “75% of participants indicated that they would not restrict access to [shared] documents within their organization.” Considering that security and privacy was important to the participants, why do you think they made this choice?
- Considering that the authors try to generalize their findings to other fields, do you have similar communication patterns as those interviewed? If not, what else do you do and why?
- The journalists often mentioned that they preferred to be able to have a face-to-face conversation for privacy and security reasons. Is this actually a viable security method?
- Can you think of any other communication software that also fulfills some of the needs laid out by the authors?
- Slack is being used for ever-increasing sizes of groups. For example, the conference HCOMP now has a Slack group for collaboration between crowdsourcing experts. Do the needs of that kind of user base change the situations?
- Bonus Question: The authors included their interview script as an appendix. Were there any issues with their script?
