The goal for my cognitive system is continually releasing/developing new functionality and applications to be released to the public. The cognitive system is a group made of 4 people measuring our success by our throughput. Our tasks are loosely coupled since half of the team is located hours outside of Ithaca. We get together via skype talk about what needed to be done and split up the work among ourselves depending on everyone’s skill set.
Both external and internal representations are relied onto accomplish out weekly tasks/goals. We lean more towards external representations like wikis, calendars, spreadsheets and emails to keep a “paper trail” of our communications, ideas, and efforts. These transformations keep us accountable and able to revisit past ideas. We use each of these transformations to provide a record of what we have discussed; our own personal secretary without the need of explicitly assigning someone the task; a developed timeline and an understanding on what can be accomplished in a given time.
Internally we communicate, in pairs, over the phone to hash through ideas before presenting our ideas to the whole group and utilize each other’s knowledge to conquer a problem. This gives us the ability to formally develop our ideas and have a quicker way of learning new material from straight from someone with experience versus googling for a while.
Weekly meetings bring us back together to realize we do have some tightly coupled facets about our system. Another member and I work face to face to develop ideas and to propel tasks forward, while each member must rely on the work someone else is doing in order to successfully meet a project deadline. This scenario is the definition of what Hutchins defines a cognitive system, because we all are seeking a common goal and have coordinated our transformations on representations to reach these goals.
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Sounds like an interesting arrangement. Are there instances when FtF interaction is necessary? Additionally, are there times when one of the tasks must be worked on simultaneously? If so...how are those interactions facilitated? I'm asking quite a bit of questions...As for commentary, it seems that the majority of cognitive systems resort to using shared wikis, calendars, or spreadsheets to organize time sensitive tasks. Which fundamentally helps to erase issues with people keeping potentially faulty records or even trying to claim ignorance…Everyone has access to a common set of information
ReplyDeleteIt looks to me like your team does a very good job in making sense of some complicated strings of communication. In my personal experience I find that digital means of collaborations are as effective if not more effective than face to face communication for organizing broad goals of the groups but are less helpful when trying to coordinate details. I would imagine without the face to face meetings every week there would be far more opportunities for details to fall through the cracks. I also like the idea of using shared calendars or spread sheets to organize details, it definitely ups the accountability of every member because everyone has access to the information basically on-demand.
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