Pernille Bjørn, Head of Technologies in Practice, who recently had an article accepted in TOCHI. The article is a comparative study of four cases in global software development questioning the CSCW fundamentals on distance – by Pernille Bjørn, Morten Esbensen, Rasmus Eskild Jensen, and Stina Matthiesen. The article is analyzing the fundamental aspects of distance as depicted in the famous paper “Distance Matters.”
Abstract:
Does distance still matter? Reporting on a comparative analysis of four ethnographic studies of global soft- ware development, this article analyzes the fundamental aspects of distance as depicted in the famous paper “Distance Matters.” The results suggest that, although while common ground, collaboration readiness, and organizational management are still important aspects for distributed collaboration, the arguments concerning coupling of work and collaboration technology readiness needs to be refined. We argue that in working remotely, closely coupled work tasks encourage remote workers to spend the extra effort required in articulation of work to make the collaboration function. Also we find that people in distributed software development have already made collaborative technologies part of their work, and individuals are comfortable with them; thus, collaboration technology readiness takes a different shape in this setting.