Workshop 6: Handover: Collaboration for Continuity of Work

Organisers:  Stephanie Wilson (City University London), Julia Galliers (City University London) and Leila Alem (CSIRO ICT Centre, Melbourne)

Workshop overview:
Handovers are collaborations to promote continuity of work across boundaries of time and space, as responsibility for a system is passed from one individual or group to another. The risk of breakdowns in the work of critical systems has been shown to increase significantly at these kinds of transitions and handovers in the healthcare sector have recently come under particular scrutiny with increased shift working and a corresponding increase in the frequency of shift handover.  Handover cannot be regarded as a simple, one-way passing of information; rather it is often a negotiated collaboration where both parties mutually determine the information to be shared. It can also be an opportunity to identify potential errors and instigate remedial action.
In spite of the acknowledged importance of handover, current practice is highly variable and supported by diverse artefacts (paper scraps, mobile devices, large shared displays etc), often locally evolved and reflecting the intricacies of the specific work and its setting.  We see a need to share experience across different domains and to achieve a better understanding of this collaborative activity.  In this workshop, we will explore experience of research and practice in handover in diverse work settings, with particular attention to theoretical frameworks for understanding handover, strategies and mediating technologies that support handover and methodologies to evaluate its efficacy.

Who should attend:
This full-day workshop will be of interest to researchers, designers and practitioners concerned with how people collaborate to ensure continuity of work.  We are keen to welcome participants with experience in diverse settings, safety critical and otherwise, to complement our own experiences of handover in healthcare.
The workshop will be open to a maximum of 15 participants.  Acceptance will be on the basis of short position papers summarising participants’ work on handover or other forms of collaboration to promote continuity of work.

More info at: http://hcid.soi.city.ac.uk/ecscw2007-handover.html

Dissemination:
Position papers and workshop outputs will be made available on the workshop website.  We are investigating a journal special issue.

Submissions:
Short position papers (2 pages) should be sent to Stephanie Wilson (steph [AT] soi.city.ac.uk) by the 20th July 2007.  Acceptance notifications will be sent by 25th July 2007.