calendar
The current calendar research has much in common with such endeavors and attempts to investigate how digital artifacts can be re-arranged to be used for distributed collaborative work crossing temporal, geographical, thematic, and digitally inscribed boundaries and thus re-alignment of organizational routines. We address this objective by drawing on several conceptual frames of reference and lines of argumentation. In particular, although recognizing the value of analyzing well-established theories like activity theory and distributed cognition, our study is also spurred by new theories like sociomateriality, imbrication, and assemblages hypothesized by Latour in his actor network theory and DeLand in his theory of assemblages.
Building on these grants, we draw an engineering blueprint that directs the re-configuration of online calendaring to encourage innovative collaborative work and the design of flexible organizational habits. Empirically, the novel service is implemented in two contexts, that is, group vacation scheduling and collective management of information. In each instance, we introduce difficult moments and offer regimes of re-organized collaborative interactions that lead to traceable digital materiality.
It should also be mentioned that while our empirical examples take their cue from digital calendars and calendar work, our findings point to a larger class of artifacts, termed digital composites, which are composed rather than built, and by this definition, they are in a state of flux because their state, at any given point in time, is partially determined even provisionally by the state of their components. The rest of the paper is structured as follows.
Digital artifacts and routines in distributed collaboration
The word artifact coins something created by humans usually for a practical purpose. There are probably as many characterizations of the nature, properties, and role of artifacts as there are disciplines. In this paper, our focus is on digital calendar artifacts, including web standards i.e. Representational State Transfer – REST protocol, information systems i.e. portals, digital services i.e. file sharing, code bundles i.e. algorithms, application programming interfaces, which have material effects on how human tasks are computer-mediated and performed.
In recent studies, digital artifacts, file sharing, digital calendar artifacts, social media calendar, digital marketing have been researched from several different angles. You and Kalli Nikos et al. explored their unique characteristics. Several authors have also tried to evaluate their materiality in particular contexts. Of concern for our purposes is that digital artifacts trace large technological trends and inherit their defining features. With the introduction of Web 2.0 and social and ubiquitous computing, digital calendar artifacts grow more interactive, reprogrammable, editable, distributed, and mobilizable across boundaries and contexts, hence able to execute their chunks of work in transparent and often human-invisible ways.
Calendars as distributed organizing artifacts
Calendars have been researched for decades and still pose several challenges for designers and information systems researchers. They have been used intensively as temporal metaphors over the years, for a broad variety of personal and group activities. Initial research analyzed paper artifacts to guide the design of computer. During the 1990s, electronic group calendars were first investigated in a variety of work settings and then also in the home.
Phalen coined the term work to ground activities that align users with the temporal sequence of events, and allow them to record, remind, schedule, monitor, and recall events within and across that temporal sequence. By providing for these activities, calendar artifacts facilitate cognitive processes like prospective remembering and retrospective remembering, thus assisting in intention formation, management, and fulfillment.
Consolidation and research emphasis
Our discussion so far emphasizes the instrumental nature of digital calendar artifacts in routines with robust temporal characteristics and crossing boundaries and anchors the sustained focus on groupware calendars and OCS for determining the performative features of a range of routines. These attempts validate designers’ long-existing dedication to maximizing artifacts with emphatic temporal metaphors like instead of spatial metaphors like maps and implement enhancements to preempt justified failures or intentional non-applications of technology.
For the case of calendars, this has been tried by establishing the close coupling between communication, relationship building tools, domain specific repositories, triggering and search mechanisms, social media calendar, digital calendars. However, the emergence of Web 2.0 and facilitating standards and technologies i.e. restful APIs offer additional options for enhancing the scope of digital calendars, therefore making them more suited to tasks that have been historically underserved or are more complicated because they involve routines across social and material environments.
Research rationale
Our starting point is that OCS provides variable support for Palen’s calendaring work but is deficient in affordances that would enhance their potential for distributed collaborative work. In particular, OCS does seem robust enough at temporal orientation through the support of several perspectives, i.e. day, week, month, agenda, etc., and reminding through supporting personalizable notifications and alarms through e-mail or SMS services, but somewhat poor at scheduling, tracking, archiving and retrieval where extra artifacts are usually involved. Indeed, in recent releases of OCS, the scheduling is partially supported by social media sharing calendars, scheduling mechanisms between users that share automatically, and e-mail invitations of events to guests.
Conclusions
The above have significant practical implications for those interested in enterprise information strategy. In particular, the digital calendar services and the cloud infrastructure composing the material pillars of enterprise-wide solutions, should be chosen cautiously. Public cloud use is a near-term solution, but in the medium to long term, more strategic commitments must be made. There is another issue regarding the provision or in-house creation of APIs that provide for the interdependent working of specified services. Public APIs like those available in our calendar service could be inadequate for all the planned purposes.
For example, social bookmarking features and metadata differ significantly from one service to another. As a result, specific developments can be required to offer the necessary added value, particularly when inter-organizational collaboration or mass deployment is anticipated. Lastly, workarounds when service components are not available or are temporarily corrupted are also valuable to build trust and user acceptance. Lastly, the current work relies on some limitations. A strong conceptualization of the nature of the digital calendar material and the matter activated across boundaries of service remains a problem that requires further attention. This article has concentrated on specified types of digital material and circumscribed services with agencies.