John Tang on review stress in a pandemic, community-level solutions and distributed work
John Tang is a Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research, joining in 2008 and having previously worked in other industrial research labs at Xerox PARC, Sun, and IBM. He has a PhD from the design division of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He is a deep expert distributed collaboration and in particular the use of video in this context, which is now highly relevant considering the increase in video conferencing in these pandemic times. He also serves in many senior editorial and papers chair roles managing the review process for papers.
In this conversation we reflect on the increasing amount of overwork and exhaustion we are seeing in the peer community and how this is playing out for the review process and also look at the broader implications. John describes it in terms of invisible disabilities and it being a community problem needing solutions at the community level. We also talk about the differential effect the pandemic is having, the particular challenges for more junior people and recognising his own privileged situation. He embodies a graciousness and generosity in how he approaches these challenges, including the impact on himself, that can serve as a role model for us all. He also reflects on the experiences of video connections in pandemic times.
“I’ve been a bit saddened by the amount of overwork and exhaustion out in our community, evidenced by the reasons why people aren’t available to do reviews. Illness, caregiving, childcare, all really good reasons that people are not available to do a review, and while it makes my job as an Editor/AC harder, my heart goes out even more to people who are dealing with daily stresses. All the more why I don’t want to needlessly add to the stress about a late review…" [email]
“It's just so common that it was so systemic that we just really needed to again, think about it as a community problem, not an individual problem and figure out how we can help each other work through this aspect of it.”
“The thing that surprised me … is that all this intentional remote connection is maintaining strong ties, but we're losing weak ties.”
“I'm super interested in how this global increase in video literacy and remote collaboration, what that's going to enable in the future”
Overview (times approximate): - see below for full Transcript
00:30 Preamble and introduction
05:10 Reviewing in a pandemic: John talks about how he thinks of the pandemic impacts (around reviewing) as invisible disability and the differential effects of the pandemic despite the supposed common experience, and how this impacts getting reviews done, how much people disclose, and the job of editors/chairs
10:25 Impacts: We discuss that reviewers, editors and authors all have impacts and the widening gap between junior and senior people and the temporal ripples of impacts.
17:25 Who has power to manage boundaries: We wonder about who is more able to say no to reviewing and how level of seniority can make a difference in how we manage work-life boundaries, and more particularly younger people trying to establish boundaries for the first time in the pandemic
23:00 Managing boundaries: We discuss the impacts of losing the office-home boundary with working from home and missing the commute and managing this.
28:35 Community issue: John talks about the challenges with reviews and reviewers as a community issue and we explore possible different ways of doing things, and a call to senior people here – a call to graciousness and generosity and how to foster that as a community on all sides and inviting senior people to step up more
39:35 Distributed work & video: We shift to discussing the experiences of distributed working from home in the pandemic, reflecting on his 30 years of research working on these topics. He talks about the challenges of supporting serendipitous interaction, reflecting on the old Media Space work, and on all the video conferencing experiences, not being surprised by the fatigue and loss of spontaneity findings from recent research, and surprised by how much we lose weak ties and the impacts of this, and by how smoothly we apparently have migrated to online and curious about what this global increase in video literacy will mean for the future, and the blurring of live and pre-recorded interaction, and the role of social acceptance.
55:15 Final thoughts: John reminds us how to think about it as a community problem and how to help each other and care for each other as a community.
58:31 End
Related Links
Web article about Microsoft’s upcoming virtual commute feature: How to create your own Microsoft Teams virtual commute, today.
A Microsoft story about the collection of wellbeing features being introduced to Microsoft productivity apps: New tools can help boost wellbeing and soothe unexpected stresses of working from home - Stories (microsoft.com)
eWorkLife Project and Anna Cox being interviewed about #FakeCommute
Media Space – example publication: https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/ENS/CSCW/2013/papers/Bly-mediaspaces-CACM93.pdf
John’s publications on video and distributed work: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=E4cMwQMAAAAJ
Acronyms
AC Associate Chair
CSCW Computer Supported Cooperative Work
HCI Human Computer Interaction
Transcript
Download the full transcript here - created with Temi.com - unedited
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