Quantified Us: A group-in-the-loop approach to team network reconstruction
Raphaël Tackx, Leo Blondel, Marc Santolini · 2021
Understanding team collaboration processes is key for the development of new technologies towards increasing groups effectiveness. In particular, the need and challenges of coordinating potentially large-scale, self-organized, collaborative initiatives have been made even more salient by the COVID-19 pandemic. Key to this challenge is the difficulty for participants to situate themselves within the larger social context. At the individual level, the Quantified-Self movement has showcased how insights from one’s own data can trigger changes in behavior, sometimes leading to fundamental insights through self-research. Building on these premises, here we present CoSo (Collaborative Sonar), a digital platform for participatory collective sensing and social research. CoSo is a web and mobile data collection platform for team network reconstruction and visualization. It leverages a “group-in-the-loop” intrinsic motivator to collect data on collaborative activities performed by a team through a mobile app, with summary statistics and visualizations of the collected data made available on a web dashboard. We showcase its use and discuss the perspectives offered by promoting group-level metacognition and collective introspection. By highlighting the invisible relationships in a group, CoSo facilitates in-the-wild studies, remote/hybrid data collection, and multi-modal sensing approaches of group interactions within professional and other social contexts.