Stacy Hobson

Dakuo Wang, Michael Muller, Qian Yang et al.

Geographically distributed teams often face challenges in coordination and collaboration, lowering their productivity. Understanding the relationship between team dispersion and productivity is critical for supporting such teams. Extensive prior research has studied these relations in lab settings or using qualitative measures. This paper extends prior work by contributing an empirical case study in a real-world organization, using quantitative measures. We studied 117 new research project teams from the same discipline within an industrial research lab for 6 months. During this time, all teams shared one goal: submitting research papers to the same target conference. We analyzed these teams' dispersion-related characteristics as well as team productivity. Interestingly, we found little statistical evidence that geographic and time differences relate to team productivity. However, organizational and functional distances are predictive of the productivity of the dispersed teams we studied. We discuss the open research questions these findings revealed and their implications for future research.

Stacy Hobson, Michael Hind, Aleksandra Mojsilovic et al.

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has led to focus on efforts to manage and mitigate the continued spread of the disease. One of these efforts include the use of contact tracing to identify people who are at-risk of developing the disease through exposure to an infected person. Historically, contact tracing has been primarily manual but given the exponential spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, there has been significant interest in the development and use of digital contact tracing solutions to supplement the work of human contact tracers. The collection and use of sensitive personal details by these applications has led to a number of concerns by the stakeholder groups with a vested interest in these solutions. We explore digital contact tracing solutions in detail and propose the use of a transparent reporting mechanism, FactSheets, to provide transparency of and support trust in these applications. We also provide an example FactSheet template with questions that are specific to the contact tracing application domain.