Quantitative assessment of collaboration

This paper presents a short literature review of a research trend that endeavors to model collaboration by quantifying each group member‟s contribution. In such a view, equity is considered as the ideal collaborative situation. We review some foundational elements of this approach, some methodological aspects, describe a case study applying such concepts and analyses, and present examples of design implications for ComputerSupported Cooperative Work. 1 Equity as a paradigm for collaboration Our aim in this paper is to present a research trend initially born in Psychology and Management science and later used in Human-Computer Interaction, modeling collaboration through the quantification of each participant‘s contributions. In this approach equity is sought, whatever the quality of contributions. Indeed for tasks involving negotiation, for collaborative learning, and every time it is important for all members to have their say, equity per se is a desirable state (Marshall et al., 2008) regardless of the quality of contributions. Equity also refers to ―democracy‖, in Habermas‘ sense (1984), as a set of ways to ensure the information communicated by the various participants is done so with minimal distortion (as opposed to a repressive communicational framework). There are many professional situations, for example in design, where contributions from multiple participants are expected to speed up exploration of the problem space, and to ensure that decisions are made through integrating multiple points of view (Sommerville et al., 1998; Wolff et al., 2005). Equitable Stephanie Buisine (2010): Quantitative assessment of collaboration. In Gunnar Stevens (Eds.), International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI), Workshop Proceedings of 9th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems COOP 2010, Aix-en-Provence, France, May 2010 (Vol. 7, Iss. 1, pp. 32-39)