Collaborative Information Seeking: The Art & Science of Making the Whole Greater than the Sum of All
2It is typically expected that when people work together, they can often accomplish goals that are difficult or even impossible for individuals. We consider this notion of the group achieving more than the sum of all individualsΓÇÖ achievements to be the synergic effect (the whole greater than the sum of all) in collaboration. Similar expectation exists for people working in collaboration for information seeking tasks. We, however, lack a methodology and appropriate evaluation metrics for studying and measuring the synergic effect. In this talk I will present details from a large-scale lab study we did to understand the productivity of collaborators in different situations. I will discuss several traditional and novel approaches to evaluate such productivity, and show how certain conditions provide (or lack of) support for optimizing the outcome of collaboration in an information seeking project. While these conditions are primarily based on location and communication channels, I will also brush upon asynchronous vs. synchronous collaboration based on our experiments. As a part of this talk, I will also demo our collaborative system, called Coagmento.