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Vol.28 No.3, July 1996
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Vol.28 No.3, July 1996 |
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The need for coping with dynamic complex situations cuts through most modern life. Examples of such situations are emergency management, military command and control, traffic control (air, rail, road, water), rescue services, grid control, intensive care and industrial plant control. Consequences of failures in such situations include uncontrolled releases, injuries, poisoning and single deaths, all of which are highly desirable to prevent.
Efficient performance in coping with dynamic situations is dependent on people's ability to notice, diagnose and react appropriately to the situation as well as their ability to combine and coordinate their perceptions, interpretations and actions. People are most efficient when their actions are so well trained that they can be performed automatically. People also have the ability to draw upon similar experiences and to reconfigure actions, in short, to be flexible and creative. (By creative is here meant the ability to come up with new and relevant solutions). This ability is related to their reflective actions, which are slow in comparison to the automated ones. Efficiency and creativity are both needed in complex dynamic situations. Both rely upon experience, skill and knowledge. The present workshop aims at discussing how efficiency and creativity in collaborative coping with complex dynamic situations can be learnt and trained as well as supported by information technology.
This workshop was proposed by a group of European researchers, working on a project under COST 14, Cooperation Technology. We wanted to share our problems and ideas with other people, both within and outside of Europe.
The objectives of the workshop were the following:
The participants are presented at their introduction.
Yvonne Wærn introduced the workshop by an overview of concepts proposed by the participants and their possible interpretations.
Figure 1 shows a general overview of the process of collective transition of knowledge and memory during the processing of one "case".
A "case" may consist for instance in a patient, an emergency situation or an incoming aeroplane. During the time this case is actual for the people involved, it will get treated in meetings (temporary collective memory) and related to other cases or principles (lasting collective memory). The case proceeds through several actions, some of which are discontinued, others are started during the life of the case. These actions are influenced by and in turn affect both the temporary collective memory and the lasting collective memory.
The lasting as well as the temporary collective memory can be regarded as "resources", which are used during the processing of the case. To the extent that the resources are externally represented (as in case records or formal institutional rules), people can refer to them. However, it should not be expected that the interpretation of the data in these resources is unanimous or over individuals, or even consequent within the same individual in different contexts.
Within the lasting collective memory there are two kinds of memories, which have traditionally been differentiated, i.e. the episodic one and the semantic one. The episodic memory is related to "cases" and consists in "stories" or "narratives" relating to these cases. The "semantic" memory or the "abstract" memory relates to the general propositions that may be formulated as to general rules about events, or as to general characteristics of objects. The lasting memory develops through abstractions and generalizations from cases as well as from application of general semantic memory to specific cases.
The temporary collective memory evolves through on the one hand the case itself, which in a dynamic situation lives a life of its own, and the actions taken upon this case, and, on the other hand through the discussions about it at meetings. These discussions are often noted in case records (such as in the "flight strips" in ATC, the patient records in medicine or the emergency records in emergency centers).
Figure 1: Transitions between Lasting and Temporary Collective Memory during the Handling of One Case
Now, we can see that the notion of "collective memory" is difficult to tackle for several reasons, related to this figure. First, we must distinguish between a lasting collective memory (which changes slowly) and a temporary collective memory which changes less slowly. Secondly, the interpretation and use of the collective memory varies between people and contexts, which means that the collective memory has not got the same meaning for everybody involved in using it. Thirdly, it may even be questioned if collective memory is an entity (a repository) or rather a process. We shall see this issue being further discussed below.
The terms and concepts offered by the participants could to some extent be related to the distinction of temporary and lasting memory, and to some extent this distinction was not applicable.
First, it was found that the distinction was most easily applied to artifacts as in Table 1.
Table 1: Computer or paper artifacts related to collective memory
Temporary Lasting
Reports Information Systems (Hägglund) Patient journals (Falzon) Databases (Hägglund) Logs (Wærn) Knowledge bases (Hägglund) Intentions (Svenmarck) Knowledge graphs (Popping) Knowledge-based services (Hägglund) Coordination mechanisms (Simone) Notification (Simone) Signs (Persson) Personal signs (Persson) Space of options (Simone)
At least one artifact was difficult to classify as the idea of "Questions, Options and Criteria" (QOC) which might serve both as a temporary artifact (the space of options) or as a lasting artifact, once the object was designed.
As to concepts, these were much more difficult to handle. A preliminary classification is attempted in Table 2.
Table 2: Concepts related to collective memory
Temporary Lasting
Operative information (Persson) Directive information (Persson) Horizon of information (Alvarez) Common information space (Persson) Situation awareness (Wærn) Occupational culture (Persson) Mutual knowledge space (Falzon) Prescriptive organization (Artman) Trajectory of information (Alvarez) Rituals (Persson) Coordination mechanisms (Simone) Articulation (Simone)
After some discussion around these concepts, the participants started presenting their position papers, and the group discussed issues as they came up.
Henrik Artman
Department of Communication Studies
Linköping University
S 581 83 Linköping
e-mail:
henar@tema.liu.se
Summary
Artman presented some first observations from a centre for rescue services.
The general problem is that all people in the central control room should have some idea of a current event to be handled, at the same time as they should each take an independent responsibility, in order to work efficiently.
During daytime each operator has special responsibility for the fire-brigade, ambulance and breakdown lorries/police/extended services respectively. The specific operator is responsible for knowing where each car in the "his/hers" service is geographically and what each unit is doing. In practice all the operators have got a quite clear image of the presence or absence of cars at their ordinary sites, as they seldom ask the responsible person about this.
The formal task allocation prescribes a distribution of responsibilities: those who are charged with keeping track of ambulances should only be doing this, others, responsible for fire trucks should only be doing this, etc. This formal distribution is counteracted by a computer system, which is introduced to keep track of the events. The computerised collective memory helps the operators to coordinate their action via the computer, while the prescriptive organisation requires them to either distributing the task immediately or telling each other when any new action is undertaken.
It seems that the computer which is designed to centralise the information in fact also decentralises the information as everybody cannot be updated on everything that is written into the computer.
As a consequence the team runs the risk that, when there is very high work load, all information get very fragmented, that is everyone knows a little about every event, but no one has a full picture of any specific detail.
In his presentation, Henrik attempted to relate the various papers to each other, and questioned the current trend of moving from generalities to particularities. Are we ready for this transition?
Henrik proceeded by claiming that we must have models, that are temporal fixations, of work to proceed and build new system. He proposed that we must both study the particulars and the whole as they go together. This might sound just as one of those cliches, but take as an example the question of responsibility. The organisation often has to know exactly who is responsible, what procedures they have used, (procedures are often designed in order to be able to tell who is responsible) etc. That is why there exist general requirements. If we neglect such and only study particular activities, we might miss quite a lot of important stuff which belongs to the cognitive system., e.g. that people forget, do not notice, have a limited attention span. It should also be noted and that responsibility in teams is always distributed over artifacts and people and that the actual decision, or working process is a collective accomplishment. This means that the ideal case of prescriptions and regulative procedures are seldom met.
The emphasis on particulars might have problems for us in designing better systems. If we can accept a model, then it follows that we can discuss this model and compare with other models in different respects. The conflict between the enthnography informed and the traditional science perspectives might do more harm that good. We should be able not only to say what people do, but also to predict what they can do and what will happen because of the intended changes. For this we need to do models, not only descriptions.
When we say that we should design systems which promote competence, we do not acknowledge that "human-artifacts" are joint cognitive systems. This means that introducing new tools, procedures or technology, forces us to work in new ways. This is not promoting competence, it is simply changing the conditions. After the new artifacts, the actors need new forms of knowledge and do not need their old forms. Reification of our views of cognition and computer systems as separate pieces is still restraining our imagination, even if we try to change our concepts by introducing a new vocabulary.
Henrik proposed that when we talk about collective memory and collective learning it is exactly all those things that traditional cognitive psychology has ignored, as they are not inside of peoples heads: symbols, tools, journals, cheat sheets, negotiations, gestures, collaborative action etc. Does this mean that we throw all cognitive psychology babies out with the bathwater? Second, we have so many different concepts that only are partly different; common information space, articulation of work, coordination mechanisms, joint cognitive system, distributed cognition, situated action, etc. How about our competence at articulating our own work in the research community?
Christine Halverson
Department of Cognitive Science,
University of California, San Diego, USA
halverso@cogsci.ucsd.edu
Summary
Much of the CSCW effort regarding collective or organizational memory has been directed to develop automation or automated aids that will fulfill the role of a collective memory base usable by a particular work force. There are several problems with this notion:
Distributed cognition facilitates applying a cognitive framework to a system. This directs observation and analysis to focus on the system's representational states and processes relevant to a particular task. The use of an object in a particular situation can be seen as the processes of coordinating with a particular representational state and interpreting it. These processes result in a task relevant representation; that is, a representational state that has been given meaning relative to its use and the situation.
What does this say for designing automation for a complex dynamic system? One thing it points out is that no matter how well designed much of the usefulness of the "collective memory" must come from the users themselves. This also means that the context of use will change over time, whether that change is anticipated or not".
In her presentation, Christine pointed out how we as researchers often look at the objects at a workplace out of their context. The practitioners' use of the objects are contextualized. With the introduction of IT new use develops, but we shall take note of the resources used in the "old" situation so that the new tools do allow these to work. Explaining use is similar to explaining to your mom (somebody who is totally naive).
An important aspect of artifacts is that they perform precomputations for us, so that we do not have to do so much complex reasoning. Memory is always recontextualized, that is adapted to the current situation. The conclusion of this for design is that the appearance of an artifact should support immediate perception and remind persons of what has to be done. Designers of IT-systems often assume that IT is the whole solution and forget the support that already exists. Examples of such support are the slide rule, "cheat sheets", customizing notes.
Another aspect of artifacts are learnability, that is design should be conceived in terms of access (visibility for instance), appropriateness, use.
Pierre Falzon & Catherine Sauvagnac
Laboratoire d'Ergonomie
Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers
41 rue Gay-Lussac, 75005 Paris, France
falzon@cnam.fr
Summary
Medical decision is not always the result of an individual process of analysis. In complex, unusual and risky situations, decisions are taken by groups of highly trained specialists who meet in order to reach a common understanding of the case and to decide on a therapeutic procedure. We are studying these situations of collective decision making with two objectives. The first one is to reach a better comprehension of the way in which these groups work in order to optimize their functioning. The second objective deals with knowledge elaboration. Beyond the case-specific therapeutic decision, do practitioners build new general knowledge while processing successive cases? How could this knowledge elaboration process be assisted? Our long-term goal is to help the group in practicing a meta-functional activity (Falzon, 1994), that is an activity that, although triggered by the occurrence of specific operational problems, is aimed at the production of new knowledge and new cognitive or organizational tools that can be re-used in later situations.
The text goes as follows. The first section describes the general context of the situation under study. The second section analyzes the functioning of a specific group, and more specifically the elements of knowledge that form the shared knowledge space, the modes of elaboration of that knowledge space, and finally the trace that is presently kept of the work of the group (as compared to the effective functioning of this group).
In his presentation, Pierre Falzon stressed the importance of meta-functional activities. He pointed out that expertise lies in adapting old knowledge to new cases and that knowledge is goal-oriented and context-sensitive. By metafunctionality is meant the elaboration of new knowledge and new tools through a reflexive activity. The following examples were given:
The important lesson is that space has to be provided for these activities.
Catherine Sauvignac presented some interesting details from observations of specialists discussing the treatment in oncology. The therapy is a result of a collective activity, where the disease is evolving, the consequences of a treatment are difficult to predict, and several disciplines must be involved. It was found inter alia that in the writing of a report, to be stored in a decision committee folder, some elements of the discussion were eliminated. Such omitted elements included justifications of decisions, rejected solutions, as well as pieces of general knowledge that were provided in the course of the discussion of a case. On the other hand some information was reconstructed such as elements of the patient's file that were not mentioned in the committee's discussion.
The discussion concerned the changes in collective memory made from meeting to report and the functions of these changes. It was suggested that the changes served the purpose of efficiency but not the purpose of learning.
Emma Alvarez
Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers
41 rue Gay-Lussac,
75005 Paris, France
Summary and Presentation
The general question posed was: Do environmental resources have an impact on acquisition of knowledge and on the construction of a collective memory?
The context is a satellite control room, where three controllers work on shift. They have similar competencies and there is no division of labour.
In this particular environment, it seems to be the case that visual and hearing access to everybody's activities make coordination possible. This access is due to the open tools and the open environment.
Two interesting concepts were introduced (both taken from Hutchins, 1990):
Per-Arne Persson
Linköping University
and the Swedish War College
Summary
All organisations are complex and the corresponding control mechanisms, for coordination and cooperation, reflect the relative degree of complexity. Increased complexity gives way for still more complex control mechanisms. A couple of strategies exist in order to handle the control functions. A military command and control (C2) organisation is structured, very information dense and is designed to make possible the coordination in a complex organisation. Division of labor usually is very well developed with clear responsibilities and interfaces between people and organisation. Problems in the usually very dynamic environment are handled along several approaches and defined in terms of actions and counteractions according to real or imaginary plans (the latter when an opponent is studied). Through the use of doctrines, standard operating procedures, rules and training, a basic ability to respond in some way is constructed. This leads to the concept of control of the environment and the development of tactics and means to do it. One theoretical base is systems theory and thinking, which unfortunately seems to be all-encompassing and used as an axiom instead of critically analysing the meaning of it.
In this working paper the military organisation serves as an example of a complex organisation, where a lot of common knowledge and information systematically is developed and maintained for the unity of effort. To a certain extent the occupational culture is visible in the form of heroes, symbols and rituals, themselves different forms of visualising the values of the leaders. The suggestion is that some have lost any active role, while others, but perhaps less evident expressions, still play critical roles in forming the structure which facilitates coordination and communication. They are therefore elements in the control information, and contribute to the organisational learning. This information is part of the organisational memory (OM), and is also a visible common information space (CIS), open to see for members of a unit.
The hypothesis is that these expressions and the messages that they carry, are worthwhile to analyse if information technology (IT) is considered as a general supporting technology. If not so, some aspect of the information flows or parts of the CIS/OM may be lost and hard to reshape. Possibly the formation of an occupational culture and making it an important part of the CIS and OM is a phenomenon in other organisations than the military, while these reflections have a more general interest. Some observations during a staff exercise are described towards a background of theories about organisations, organisational culture and communication theory. The implications of the observations for development of supporting technologies are discussed briefly.
Per-Arne Persson presented the thoughts behind his position paper and also posed some questions related to collective learning and Information Technology: It is said that "when formed prior to hostilities, coalitions have time to concur on doctrines, tactics, techniques and procedures".
He asked: what time is necessary? What common techniques, procedures, knowledge are developed? What about the time needed for review of plans? For wargaming? What about communication, interoperability, liaison?
Coordination is performed by implicit and explicit means.
Implicit Explicit
Shared mental models Requests for transfer of resources, information Training Coordination messages Leader's periodic update Directing-control Anticipation of needs Standards
These different means are related to the type of control information in the following way:
Control information Directive (long-term)
Operative (immediate)
Explicit Order, command Training, goals
Implicit Procedures Standards Culture, practice ethos
The final questions and conclusions were formulated as follows:
The organizational memory should be supported by structure, ethos, organisation, rules and procedures. These form the Common Information Space.
Is the organizational memory mainly concerned with non-dynamic knowledge?
Is collective memory something which takes place simultaneously in several individuals? Is it selective and adapted to the individual's task and situations? Does its value decrease if it is not simultaneous?
These questions were so encompassing that we had to postpone answering them in order to see if we could simplify them by further perspectives on the problem.
Carla Simone:
Dipartimento di Informatica-- Universita' di Torino
Corso Svizzera 185-- 10149 Torino, Italy
e-mail:
simone@di.unito.it
Summary
Collective learning and collective memory are quite complex topics not only because they involve several interdisciplinary aspects that make it difficult even to define them in an effective way but also because it is not clear which are the purposes they serve. In other words, why should an organization and its members pay a price for them? We are not claiming that this question has no answer, rather that the answers are usually very generic and cover a broad set of motivations: among the others, improving the capability of handling exceptions (up to emergency and time-critical situations), reducing the cost of the turn-over, enhancing the consciousness of the organizational members about their dynamic context to improve creativity or positive attitudes to cooperation. The point is that it is hard to imagine a common way to deal with all these requirements in a single approach and strategy for `realizing' collective learning and collective memory. And, of course, to identify any computational support to these processes.
As a first piece of evidence, each organization motivation for constructing a collective memory carries specific learning techniques and their combination, among the several that have been considered: by teaching, by doing, by examples, etc. As a second piece of evidence, each motivation identifies different pieces of information that are worthwhile to learn and/or to record, and different ways to relate them for future retrieval.
Bearing in mind this premise, our focus is on collective learning and collective memory motivated by the increasing of people's capability to deal with exceptions and critical situations in contexts showing dynamic demands of by the organization and its environment. Moreover, our focus is on articulation work more that on the work content specific to each field of work.
From the articulation work perspective, the successful handling of exceptions and critical situations is the result of many concomitant factors, among which we would like to underline the following:
The possibility to forecast or to recognize the events leading to the situation well in advance. This not only might reduce the range of negative effects generated from the emergency but also increase the time available to define suitable strategies for its management.
The possibility of having a `complete' picture of the `current' situation. The two words in quotes highlight where the difficulties arise. In fact, in the general case, the work setting in which the critical situation occurs shows a high degree of distributedness so that the completeness of the picture is hard to reach since it is impossible to reconstruct its global state. On the other hand, the available pieces of information about the parts of the work settings that have to be involved when the exception arises are rarely updated (critical situations are irregular) and therefore weakly reliable.
The possibility of recovering the past experience in the management of `similar' situations. This is often described as the possibility of accessing an `organizational memory' for information that should be first of all correctly interpreted and then applied or adapted to the current situation.
While not exhaustive the above points show that (part of) the management of emergencies is deeply rooted in the everyday work, either as memory of experiences or as a capability of interpreting of what is going on or is expected in the near future. Consequently, any (technological) support to the emergency management should be deeply coupled with the (technological) support to the everyday work on the one hand, and on the other hand this latter has to be conceived, from the very beginning, as a provider of information potentially exploitable when the critical situation arises.
In her presentation, Carla suggested the following uses of collective memory:
If we imagine that we have to extract knowledge to a collective memory for future use, which knowledge has to be extracted? The knowledge may concern the field of work, and thus be domain specific, and it may concern articulation work, which makes it situation specific. The articulation work is concerned with creating conditions for coordination.
Carla is working with a concept called "coordination mechanisms". By this is meant a set of protocols and artifacts for coordinating behaviours. These structure the information and reflect the behaviour. In a computerized form, the coordination mechanisms should be malleable and linkable. Two types of coordination mechanisms were suggested:
Peter Svenmarck
Division of Industrial Ergonomics
Linköping Institute of Technology
Summary and Presentation
Peter reported on a study performed in a "microworld" made for studying how people manage their coordination problem in a dynamic environment. Four people with limited views of the world try to coordinated their actions to fight a simulated forest fire. In previous studies it had been found that local coordination was effected to a great extent by communicating intentions, since prediction of the others' activity is the best way to handle the delays associated with effort. This particular study was designed to investigate the effect of communicating intentions by visual means rather than by explicit communication. In social perception results indicate that we perceive intentions directly from body movement. A similar perception of intentions was attempted in the context of fire fighting by visualising information about movement of the fire fighting units on a blackboard shown to all subjects in the group. It was found that the efficiency of fire fighting was not increased in the experimental group getting visualized information about intentions. However, the explicit communication of intentions decreased.
Sture Hägglund
Department of Computer and Information Science
Linköping University
S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden
Summary
In this paper we discuss a situation where we apply various computer-based techniques, in particular knowledge-based systems, for supporting knowledge management in organisations. These techniques may be instrumental for collective learning and organisational memory, understood as the ability for individuals to jointly develop their knowledge and understanding of subjects crucial for a given organisation, as well as the ability for the organisation as such to access and manage the same knowledge.
Three specific issues of salience in this context were raised as topics for discussion, namely
These matters are not well understood in general and viewing them in the context of collaborative work presents additional interesting aspects.
After Sture Hägglund's presentation, some discussion about the utility of a knowledge based approach arose. Some people were critical about the knowledge extraction procedure and the resulting decontextualisation of knowledge. Others were considering the use of knowledge-based systems and wondered if there were any detailed studies of such use. Actually, it seems that these issues have not yet been addressed to any great extent.
Roel Popping
University of Groningen
Social Science Information Technology
Grote Ruzenstraat 15
9712 TG Groningen, The Netherlands
e-mail:
R.Popping@ppsw.rug.nl
Summary
One of my research tasks is to work on the development of so-called knowledge graphs. Knowledge graphs can be viewed as a particular kind of semantic networks. Such a graph can be used as a partner in the decision process. I have no empirical data regarding what the cooperative aspects here look like. The knowledge necessary for the decision process has its own nature, and probably needs its own representation. I would be happy to get more insight in all this. The graphs fit in the domain the group is working in.
One of the essential differences between knowledge graphs and semantic networks is the explicit choice of only a few types of relations. In semantic networks most attention is given to the representation of the concepts in the network, while in the knowledge graphs most attention is directed to performing inferences on the relations. The construction of knowledge graphs starts with the extraction of information from texts. The result is a list of concepts, labelled points, and a list of typed links between the points. These form the author graph. The most important type of link is the causal relation. The next step is called concept identification, where various author graphs are combined into one graph by identifying points with each other. Here synonyms and homonyms are taken into account. The result is a compiled graph. This graph is further investigated in a procedure-concept integration where one tries to find interesting substructures, and in a procedure-link integration where new links are inferred from the given ones. The result is called the integrated graph.
In case cooperation for process management is time critical and expertise is distributed (in terms of competence as well as time and place) it should be possible to integrate specific knowledge one has (to be investigated is which knowledge) with the available graph. Complementing knowledge is integrated, knowledge on which disagreement exists is indicated. This representation is returned to the experts (to be investigated is how this can be done best). The experts can use it in their process of decision making. Because there might be several sources of knowledge it might be a good idea to use this all in a CSCW environment (to be investigated). Alternatives for the knowledge graphs might be cause maps and case based reasoning. To be investigated is why the graphs are preferred.
The work is in progress and it cannot yet be judged to what extent a knowledge graph may be useful in a dynamic situation.
Liam J. Bannon
Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.
Email:
bannonl@ul.ie
Kari Kuutti
Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
and
University of Oulu, Dept. Information Processing Science
Linnanmaa, FIN-90570 Oulu, Finland
E-mail:
kuutti@rieska.oulu.fi
Presentation
Liam Bannon, who is the coordinator of a COST 14 group concerned specifically with "Organizational memory and Common Information Spaces", presented some existing ideas about organizational memory. In particular, he pointed out two difficulties with the concept: one concerned the "organization" as a collection of individuals versus an entity by itself, the other concerned with the static view of organizational memory versus the dynamic view of organizational remembering. He reminded of the classic work by Sir Frederick Bartlett, which concerned "remembering", not memory, and which, together with work from contemporaries in the Soviet Union such as Vygotsky and Zinchenko pointed to the constructive nature of remembering.
The consequences of this view is that cooperative work cannot be facilitated simply by the provision of a shared database, but requires the active construction of the participants of a common information space, where the meanings of are debated and resolved, at least locally and temporarily.
Thus, a collective memory must to some extent rely upon developing a common meaning. However, this implication conflicts with the idea that "meaning" is developed in use, and that the same data may get different meanings in different contexts. The solution might lie in both developing a common information space and allowing people using it access to the actors and contexts in which the information was originally produced.
Most participants in the group were willing to accept the idea that "remembering" is an important concept to use besides "memory". However, the consequence for collective management of dynamic processes were not easy to see, and we turned to a general discussion.
The general discussion started with asking for reasons for storing information. Several reasons were found, such as:
All these reasons are important in the context of dynamic processes.
Accident analyses for instance are supported by the legal demand of storing information in the "black box" of aeroplanes. Analyses of medical cases are supported by the patient journals, which may be used for reflection and learning as well as for justification of actions taken. In a time-stressed situation, the precomputations inherent in routines and checklists serve to alleviate cognitive load from the actors. In situations where the same information is used repeatedly, the reuse of information serves the same purpose.
These situations can then be regarded as "distributed remembering", where the demand on memory is spread over people and artifacts.
The problem of using information storages arises when context of use changes. Then we should learn from the fact that people forget. A lasting collective memory may hinder the natural forgetting caused by changing context. How can we counteract the conservative force lying in a collective information storage? If only minor changes are needed, people must be prepared to update the collective memory. If major changes are required, or even restructuring, the memory repository may be a major obstacle which has to be thrown over board. Who are willing to take that responsibility?
Although the workshop thus ended in new questions, some concepts were better understood after the workshop and the topic of collective handling of dynamic processes was further illuminated by the discussions held. In particular, the usefulness of collective memory for precomputations in and learning from a dynamic situation should be stressed.
Department of Communication Studies
Linköping University
S 581 83 Linköping, Sweden
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Vol.28 No.3, July 1996 |
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