Just slack it: A study of multidisciplinary teamwork based on ethnography and data from online collaborative software

Abstract

New digital technologies for team communication have changed how people work and solve complex problems. Now, millions of people use Online Collaborative Software (OCS) daily, exchanging messages and files in diverse contexts. This article presents a case study of teamwork through the lens of a popular OCS called Slack. Slack was used by a multidisciplinary academic team of designers, social scientists, and engineers working on new biomedical technology. In this work, we investigate whether activity in Slack mirrors social interactions and project progress. We compare team activity in Slack: frequencies of public messages, replies, explicit mentions, membership changes to the 18-month ethnography of the team offline. Our analysis shows team engagement around important project milestones, correlation of meeting attendance, and activity in online public discussions. We visualize the team’s multidisciplinary collaboration throughout the project and discuss the limitations of technology to reflect team interactions.