Accepted Papers

This is the list of papers accepted for the workshop:

Title: Trust in Electronically-Supported Networks of Political Activists
Author: Markus Rohde

This position paper is based on experiences and insights gathered in several long-term studies of the ICT usage of political activists and civil society networks. These studies include the introduction of a community system for Iranian NGOs, (participant) observation of the European Social Forum (and its respective organization committees), and interviews with Palestine activists fighting against Israeli occupation, using social media platforms. The position paper is mainly interested in the particular need for trust of political activists, who quite often are endangered by political conflicts, disrupted environments and instable situations, investigation by authorities, imprisonment etc.

Title: Commitment manifested in activity: A non-instrumental approach to commitment in virtual teams
Author: Rasmus Eskild Jensen

We investigate how commitment manifests itself in close collaborative practices of virtual teams. These commitment activities may change dynamically over time and towards different areas. By identifying how commitment is manifested in practice, we can also expand our knowledge on trust in virtual teams. However, we do not propose a causal relationship between trust and commitment in virtual teams, but argue that commitment and trust emerge from practice as dynamic concepts that change over time.

Title: Establishing Trust in Critical Situations
Authors: Bruno S. Nascimento, Adriana S. Vivacqua, Marcos R.S. Borges

Critical scenarios, such as emergency response, generally involve groups of people that alternate between collocated and remote work. Groups are composed of small teams and a number of decisions are made while these smaller teams are working separately, in different locations. These decisions may impact not only each others’ work, but also team safety and the outcome of the activity as a whole. Decision making in these situations involves a lot of uncertainty and groups have to trust each other to provide crucial information and to carry out orders in the best possible way.

Title: Designing Tools to Support Trust in Distributed Software Teams
Authors: Sabrina Marczak, Ban Al-Ani, David Redmiles, Rafael Prikladnicki

Software development is an inherently collaborative activity requiring team members to coordinate and communicate with each other in order to accomplish their tasks. Software development in a distributed setting exacerbates the challenges of collaborating as team members are forced to interact with remote colleagues and emphasizes the importance of trust. We posit that tools can support the development of trust is distributed teams; however, we also recognize that the understanding of how to develop such tools is still limited. This position paper argues that we need to further the understanding of what features and software requirements are needed to better support trust development and to subsequently design better tools for such a purpose.

Title: Trust and Control in Virtual Teams: Unraveling the impact of Team Awareness Systems in Virtual Teams
Author: Lionel P. Robert Jr.

The inability to convey contextual knowledge has proven to be harmful to the development of trust in virtual teams. Awareness systems have been offered as a way to provide contextual information and promote trust. However, awareness systems allow both team members and supervisors the ability to monitor virtual team members. Monitoring is a form of control and the relationship between trust and control is not well understood. Prior literature indicates that control can both impact the development of trust and alter the effects of trust. In some cases, control helps, hurts, or has no effect on the development and influence of trust. This position paper argues that a clear understanding of control and trust is needed to fully comprehend the implications of awareness systems.

Title: Social Media and Trust Building in Virtual Teams: The Design of a Replicated Experiment
Authors: Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile, Nicole Novielli

In this paper, we present the proposal for a partial replication of a controlled experiment to further assess how knowing personal and expertise information about other team members may enhance initial trust building. Other than increasing confidence into the findings of the original study, we also aim at evaluating whether the provision of personal social media information, can lead to even higher level of trust in virtual teams.

Title: Non-equivalent Communication Technology Impact on Trust in Partially Distributed Conceptual Design Teams
Authors: Yoon Suk Lee, Marie C. Paretti, Brian M. Kleiner

In this workshop paper, we examined how non-equivalent communication technologies impact on trust in partially distributed conceptual design teams. To incorporate the uniqueness of partially distributed team setting, we distinguished trust into two categories, which were trust towards distant partners (distant trust) and trust towards co- located partners (co-located trust). Findings revealed that media has a varying impact on distant trust depending on different combinations of communication technologies utilized in the experiment. Further research directions are discussed.

 

Call for Papers

Abstract

The workshop on Trust in Virtual Teams provides an opportunity for in-depth discussion and community building in which trust in virtual teams will be the central theme. Virtual teams have become prevalent as the result of several aspects which come into play during collaborative activities. While there is some progress in supporting collaborations among members of virtual teams, trust remains an aspect that bears further investigation. Trust is essential for effective and efficient collaborations to take place and is more challenging when people are unable to meet face-to-face.

Workshop Themes

This workshop aims to generate discussions which address three key issues within the general theme:

  1. the factors that engender and inhibit trust;
  2. the structure of a trust framework; and
  3. the requirements for software tools that support the development of positive trust during virtual collaborations.

Submissions

Interested participants must submit a 2 to 4 page position paper that includes the following details:

  • Titles, names, affiliations, and emails of each author.
  • An introduction and background to the topic discussed in the position paper.
  • A discussion of one or more of the central workshop themes.
  • A short biography of each author’s background, their interest in this field and their motivations for participating in the workshop.

Submissions must be in English and formatted using the CSCW 2013 template (Word version can be downloaded here and the Latex version here). Papers should be submitted electronically by November 16, 2012 (visit the submission page), with participant notification by December 11, 2012 through our submission web site.

All the submissions will be reviewed by workshop organizers. Accepted position papers will be made available to all participants just prior to the workshop. Workshop participants will be expected to prepare a poster that will support discussions on the workshop theme of interest.