Understanding and supporting emergent and temporary collaboration across and beyond community and organizational boundaries

Abstract

The way the Computer Supported Cooperative work (CSCW) community talks about, defines and investigates 'work' has changed since the early workplace studies. In the current literature, work has been described as being distributed, cross-organizational and multi-actor dependent, volunteer-based, fleeting, opportunistic, in-between and community-based. Collaborative work has also been examined in the formation of Publics, as Infrastructuring or as Knotworking. Work and collaborative work is indeed something that can be unforeseen by most or all of the involved actors. It can emerge and take place temporarily at the boundaries of established entities, and be independent of existing collaboration protocols. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners who are interested in how we study and discuss very open-ended and emergent forms of collaboration, occurring in improvised, temporary communities of action, at the boundaries of established communities or organizations, to address issue that challenges current organization of work. The aim of the workshop is to open a space of reflection on relevant concepts, through the discussion of concrete examples and cases.