Track 13. Uncertainty in Digital Humanities Author: Enric Senabre

1. Dotmocracy & Planning Poker
for uncertainty management
in collaborative research
Two examples of co-creation techniques
derived from digital culture
Enric Senabre Hidalgo
@esenabre
esenabre@uoc.edu

2. Uncertainty in scientific research
● Uncertainty lies at the hearth of research and scientific activity and its type
of complex, collaborative workflows.
○ Uncertainty when defining methodologies and goals (Turner & Cochrane, 1993)
○ Uncertainty about goal achievement and methods to succeed (Lassi &
Sonnenwald, 2010)
● Unconcluded paradox when managing collaborative research projects (Vom
Brocke & Lippe, 2015)
“On the one hand, research projects operate under considerable uncertainty and require
freedom and flexibility if they are to generate innovative results. On the other hand,
uncertainty needs tight management in order to avoid failure, and creativity needs firm
structures in order to be transformed into widely usable project outcomes”.
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3. Collaborative research and participation
3

4. Digital culture as driver for co-creation
● Expansion of artifact mediated collaboration (Dwyer & Suthers, 2005)
● Rise of the prosumer as cultural actor (Garcia-Ruiz et al., 2015)
● Software & new media have “taken command” (Manovich, 2013)
● Two influential “creative classes”:
○ Participation (interaction) designers
○ Software (agile) developers
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5. Participatory design & Agile frameworks
● Emerged in Scandinavia in
the 70s, prior to design
thinking evolution.
● Empower users of
computer systems to play
active role in designing
them.
● Interaction design started
to generate methods like
prototyping, ’mock-ups’ or
scenarios.
● Visual techniques for
designing projects in
complex and uncertain
circumstances.
● Software as fast-growing
and influential industry.
● A full cultural system of
norms, procedures and
appropriations.
● Shift from rigid and
’waterfall’ planning to more
effective collaboration
processes.
● Workflows more continuous
and incremental based on
principles of adaptability,
group autonomy, modularity
and self-organised
collaboration. 5

6. Dotmocracy process & Planning poker
How can both co-creation techniques be applied for uncertainty management and
decision-taking in collaborative research contexts?
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Collaborative selection
technique: generates a shared
visualization in which the team’s
wisdom about its priorities
emerges through the individual
perceptions of each member.
Agile technique for planning
and coordinating workflows: a
consensus-based, gamified
technique for estimating within
teams the effort behind specific
tasks.

7. Applied in 9 research contexts (94 participants)
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Group of researchers from
different universities selecting
research questions about
sustainability at the beginning of
the citizen science project ’City
Station - Environmental Health
Clinic x Barcelona’.
1. Research topics: Problems or concerns to
prioritise at the explorative phase of a
collaborative research initiative.
2. Research questions: To visualize and
discuss among different clusters of
potential research questions.
3. Research methods: To reflect the
expertise of an interdisciplinary research
team in relation to qualitative and
quantitative scientific methods.
4. Community interests: To identify
priorities related to specific policies or
measures to apply in action-research, from
different perspectives.

8. Applied in 9 research contexts (94 participants)
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Results after a planning poker
session about research and
policy evaluation at a CECAN
workshop.
1. Effort for writing a short text for a call
for abstracts of a conference.
2. Effort for writing a 5-8 pages theoretical
manuscript about a known topic.
3. Effort for preparing a one-morning
workshop with research subjects.
4. Effort for preparing questions and
conducting a structured interview.
5. Effort for leading the proposal of a
European funded project with partners.
6. Effort for preparing slides for a
presentation in a conference.
7. Effort for the literature review needed
for a new research topic.
8. Effort for reviewing a research paper for a
journal.

9. Discussion and future research
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● Co-creation techniques seem useful for improving collaborative
decision-taking mechanisms in collaborative research.
● Need to test and observe in more participative research contexts and
cases, for example to solve potential tendency of bandwagon effect in
dotmocracy.
● Develop in parallel indicators of team cohesion and shared perceptions
about uncertainty, limitations or work capacity.
● Need to study more similar methods from the perspective of discourse
analysis and team science interaction.

10. References
● Monica Lassi and Diane H Sonnenwald. 2010. Identifying factors that may impact the adoption and use of a social science
collaboratory: a synthesis of previous research. Information Research 15, 3, 15–3.
● J Rodney Turner and Robert A Cochrane. 1993. Goals-and-methods matrix: coping with projects with ill defined goals and/or
methods of achieving them. International Journal of project management 11, 2, 93–102.
● Jan vom Brocke and Sonia Lippe. 2015. Managing collaborative research projects: A synthesis of project management
literature and directives for future research. International Journal of Project Management 33, 5, 1022–1039.
● Nathan Dwyer and Daniel D Suthers. 2005. A study of the foundations of artifact mediated collaboration. In Proceedings of
the 2005 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning 135–144.
● Garcia-Ruiz, R., Ramirez-Garcia, A. and Rodríguez-Rosell, M.D.M., 2014. Media literacy education for a new prosumer
citizenship. Educación en alfabetización mediática para una nueva ciudadanía prosumidora. Comunicar, 22(43), pp.15-23.
● Lev Manovich. 2013. Software takes command. Vol. 5. A&C Black. 10
Thank you
Enric Senabre Hidalgo
@esenabre
esenabre@uoc.edu