Virtual Communities OzCHI 2006 Workshop
Approaches to the Design of Social Software for Dis-Organisations : A One-Day Workshop in Association with OZCHI 2006

A fundamental challenge exists for distributed organisations seeking to
foster collaboration: understanding and capitalising on the
inter-relationships between collaborative tools and techniques to
support generation of ideas and innovation. Commercial imperatives
underpin research into these inter-relationships, in terms of how to
create a culture and environment in which ideation and innovation can
flourish.

This workshop will address the collaborative needs of organisations that
are distributed or otherwise informally structured. In particular we
will explore approaches to the design of tools that support increased
communication and social interaction within such groups. Traditionally,
support systems have been introduced from the top downwards but there is
increasing evidence to suggest that alternative approaches can be even
more effective. The increasing use of bottom-up, emergent technologies
such as wikis and weblogs, is a well-known phenomenon. This workshop
seeks to address approaches for the design of such tools.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together people with an
interest in social software and those whose concerns relate to
user-centred design approaches. Social software as embodied in current
systems, such as wikis, is typically developed and introduced from the
bottom of an organisation and works its way upwards. Even when more
traditional design adopts a user-centred approach, instigation for the
introduction of new systems often comes from the top of an organisation.
The workshop will address this seeming dichotomy: how can this bottom-up
adoption be facilitated and encouraged by those at the top. More
specifically, we aim to address how approaches to the design of the
tools themselves can stimulate increased adoption. There are also
fundamental differences in the nature of the software itself which the
workshop will also cover. In comparison to traditional groupware like
Groove, social software tends to be more lightweight and at least in the
case of wikis and weblogs more extensible. One important question is how
these characteristics contribute to the apparent success of social
software. Many of these tools come from a technically minded background
and have not received any formal usability testing, let alone had any
form of user participation during the design process. How could such
testing or participation be of benefit?

We invite papers, which may describe approaches and work in progress as
well as finished research, length 3-5 pages. In keeping with the
workshop theme of bottom-up social software at work, topics of interest
include, but are not limited to:
* Design methods for social software
* Evaluation of social software impact
* Categorisation of social tools
* Social Software at Work
* Integrating social software and task oriented software
* Issues around self-image as represented through social software
usage
Important Dates :
* Submission of papers: 22nd September
* Notification to authors: 6th October 2006
* Camera Ready papers due: 12th October 2006

The Virtual Communities Project is funded by the Australasian CRC for
Interaction Design http://www.interactiondesign.com.au . Virtual
communities is researching how to improve work in distributed
organisations, looking at how to help these organisations translate
their ideas into actions. We develop models and business cases that
describe key principles, success stories and how-tos.

Programme Committee:
Jeremy Yuille (RMIT), Ralf Muhlberger (University of Queensland), Fiona
Peterson (RMIT), Laurene Vaughan (RMIT), Markus Rittenbruch (University
of Queensland), Alastair Weakley (University of Technology, Sydney)