Microblogging's impact on collaboration awareness: A field study of microblogging within and between project teams

Abstract

Despite popular use of IM, Email, and other social software (e.g., blogs and wikis) in collaborative work, the maintenance of project status awareness among team members remains a critical research problem. The lack of timely project status sharing in teams can critically limit task coordination efficiency, expertise sharing opportunities, and development of other social components in teamwork (e.g., common ground building, and feeling of connectedness). In this context, we report a field study indicating that Microblogging as a light-weight informal communication media helped foster exchanging of non-critical updates (e.g., small milestones towards completing a task; problems/issues one's working on, but not too critical for reporting; undeveloped ideas/thoughts just came out of a conversation) among co-workers as social interaction. We also report how such microblog-mediated informal sharing benefited work collaboration in various ways within and across project teams. © 2011 IEEE.