Landmarks in Distributed Collective Practice Michael J. Muller IBM Research One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA USA 02142 michael_muller@us.ibm.com Olga Kuchinskaya Department of Communication University of California - San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503 okuchins@weber.ucsd.edu Suzanne O. Minassian IBM Research One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA USA 02142 sominass@us.ibm.com VISION Our perspective on Distributed Collective Practice is based on the assumption that the study of DCP would benefit from looking at large-scale ad hoc and cross-boundary collaborative processes in organizations. Our research does not address Internet collectives (such as Free/Open Source Software) but we believe that the questions raised in this research are of importance for the broader DCP studies. Building on the work of Bowker and Star (Bowker and Star 1999, Star 1995, 2002), as well as Schmidt (Schmidt, 1997; Schmidt and Bannon, 1992), we propose a concept of ‘shared landmarks’ to facilitate the discussion of articulation work in distributed ad hoc collectives, especially collectives cutting across organizational, geographic, institutional and other boundaries. WORKSHOP ISSUES The issue of how people ‘navigate’ distributed ad hoc work spaces is a theme that speaks directly to the DCP: how is ‘articulation work’ organized and supported in DCP? What is the ‘stuff’ of articulation work? ‘Shared landmarks’ is one way of answering these questions. As it will become evident below, the concept acquires particular importance when collaborative processes become more distributed and ad hoc. Besides ‘distribution,’ the concept of shared landmarks speaks to the other two DCP themes as well: ‘making a collective’ and ‘practice.’ The questions of distribution of labor, roles, articulation artifacts surface in connection to ‘shared landmarks.’ We will demonstrate some of these connections on the example of our research into responses to Request for Proposal in some businesses and universities in the US. We hope that the Workshop discussion will help us understand these issues further. CURRENT RESEARCH DIRECTION The concept of ‘shared landmarks’ used here to describe social navigation of collaborative information environments is based in our study of how people orient, navigate, and work together in while working on complex activities in organizations (e.g., Muller, 2004, Moran, 2003). One collective practice that we have studied in depth is how people collaborate in the organizational practices around receiving a Request For Proposals (RFP) and in Proposal Writing (PW) in response to that request. Theoretical Framework Our conceptual approach is based on the research into ‘infrastructural work’ (Bowker and Star, 1999), boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1995), and related concepts of ‘articulation work’ (Schmidt and Bannon 1992, Schmidt and Simone 1996) that we assume are deeply familiar to the DCP Workshop participants. Grounding ourselves in this conceptual framework, we attempt to bring it into dialogue with the studies of landmarks in HCI design. The concept of landmarks emerges in the studies of how individuals use recognizable features as means for finding paths through complex information spaces (e.g., Benyon, 1998; Chen and Czerwinski, 1998; Dieberger and Frank, 1998). We hope to extend this relatively individualistic use of landmarks to a shared, collaborative setting. We are concerned with the types of objects and entities that may serve as boundary objects (or collectively, as a boundary infrastructure), which can serve similarly to the earlier study of individualistic use of landmarks, but in a shared information place of the kind described by Harrison and Dourish (1996). They claimed that designers may offer an abstract space in which people can interact, but the people shape that space into a recognizable, inhabited place, in which the abstract capability of interaction takes on specific meanings. We are concerned here with the concept of an inhabited space in which actors move and coordinate their actions, in part through the use of located objects in that space. We are concerned both with the formally inscribed objects of Schmidt, and the less formal, more hybrid and interpretable objects of Star and Bowker. Specifically, our study is concerned with how workers navigate through complex activities and artifacts in the shared work of proposal writing in response to a request for proposals. Method Our research is based on 15 interviews (conducted during July and August 2004) with people involved in the RFP response processes in 10 different companies. In five cases (different company in each case), our informants worked with us using the CARD technique (Muller, 2001), through which they co-constructed a poster illustrating their own practices, and the practices of their organization, in .