2nd International Workshop on Hybrid Collaboration – Analyzing Collaborative Interaction

Introduction

Hybrid collaboration, where co-located participants are working together with remote participants, is increasingly established as a de-facto standard practice in our everyday professional lives. Since the first edition of this workshop in 2019, the pool of research has considerably increased. However, studying such collaborative practices is still met with skepticism by researchers due to the considerable effort that is connected to the according empirical endeavors. In this workshop, we aim at bringing together
researchers and practitioners who are interested in the analysis of collaborative practices in general (i.e., co-located or remote), and/or a domain transfer to hybrid collaboration in particular.

Background and Workshop Themes

• What are the opportunities and challenges of researching hybrid collaboration today?
• How can collaborative practices in hybrid meetings be studied in naturalistic environments, including methodology of different fields, such as Conversation Analysis?
• What are the prospects of using automation in the analysis of recorded observational data of (hybrid) collaborative interaction?
• How can we prototype hybrid collaboration and conduct controlled experiments?
• Which established, alternative, or entirely novel research methods can help to tackle those challenges?
• For researchers who recently conducted inquiry of hybrid collaboration: What can we learn from prior (possibly recent) studies of hybrid collaboration; what are the major take-aways?

Important Dates

• Position Paper Submissions to our Workshop: 30 May 2025 (AoE)
• Workshop Day: 1 July 2025

Call for Participation

The workshop will be open to all those interested. We invite participants to submit a position paper (up to 4 pages in length + references using the recent ACM Conference Proceedings Primary Article Template format) via email to Thomas Neumayr and Frederik Hirschmann. The submissions will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and judged by their quality concerning relevance and potential to stimulate discussion at the workshop.
Accepted position papers will be distributed among the participants well before the workshop to allow a familiarization with each others’ topics. In this process, participants are asked to reflect on the other submissions and bring questions with them.

Workshop Mode

A preliminary workshop schedule can be viewed below. The workshop will start with short impulse presentations of the participants’ position papers. In the afternoon, there will be a discussion reflecting on the different presentations and possible connections between the topics. This is used as preparation to facilitate associative thinking which is helpful for the identification of current and future research agendas. Next, one or two research agendas are assigned to small groups of three to four participants who further reflect on them based on their own experiences and try to formulate a common research aim. During the concluding consolidation session, the different research aims are discussed and rated based on their relevance. If possible, a common mission statement will close the workshop.

Program and Accepted Submissions

• 09.00 – 09.15 Welcome and Introduction
• 09.15 – 10.30 Workshop Focus
  • Introductory Thoughts by the Organizers
    • Frederik Hirschmann & Thomas Neumayr – Description and Analysis of Hybrid Collaboration
    • Tuire Oittinen & Minttu Vänttinen – Situated construction of interactional space in hybrid training settings
• 10.30 – 10.45 Coffee Break
• 10.45 – 12.15 Paper Presentations 20 minutes each + 5 min Q&A
  • Jennifer Gerbl – Transitions Within The Flow of Work of Hybrid Workgroups
  • Julia Kleinau – Transitioning and Navigating Space in Hybrid Collaboration
  • Lily Kruse, Annika Augner, Jonathan Müller – HYBEAM – A Mixed Reality Prototype for Inclusive and Embodied Hybrid Collaboration
  • Jan Schwarzer, Michael Koch, Susanne Draheim, Julian Fietkau & Kai von Luck – An Integrated Methodological Framework to Investigate Hybrid Work Technologies
• 12.15 – 13.15 Lunch Break
• 13.15 – 15.00 Interactive Part: Small-group Discussion/World Café
• 15.00 – 16.00 Consolidation and Wrap-up

All accepted workshop papers along with additional material such as presentation slides, results and meaningful photographs or video material will be published on the workshop website unless participants do not wish for their material to be published there. Also, if possible, accepted workshop papers will be published in CEUR. Workshop participants will be asked if they are interested in jointly authoring a position paper or opinion piece about the essential workshop results and backgrounds.

Impressions and Presentations

Workshop Organizers

Thomas Neumayr is an assistant professor and researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria in Hagenberg and earned a PhD at the Johannes Kepler University Linz on description and analysis of hybrid collaboration. His research interests include collaborative practices of smaller-sized teams, interaction design, and personalization. He holds a BA and MA in Communication and Knowledge Media from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Thomas is the elected speaker of the special interest group ABIS of the German Gesellschaft für Informatik. He, along with Mirjam Augstein, received a best paper award for their Domino framework at ACM CSCW 2018 and was the main organizer together with Banu Saatçi of the first international workshop on hybrid collaboration in 2019.

Frederik Hirschmann is a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria in Hagenberg and a PhD student at the Johannes Kepler University Linz on the topic of hybrid collaboration spaces, i.e., the environments in which hybrid collaboration occurs. He holds an MSc in Human-Centered Computing from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and one in Human-Computer Interaction from a joint degree program of the Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg and Salzburg University of Applied Sciences.

Mirjam Augstein is Professor for Personalized and Collaborative Systems at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria in Hagenberg. She received her PhD and recently her venia docendi at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz. Her main research interests include adaptive systems and computer-supported cooperative work. Further, Mirjam is interested in User Experience and Interaction Design as well as novel User Interfaces. She has recently coordinated several related research projects and organized several workshops in the area of HCI, e.g., the Workshop on Intelligent and Personalized Human-Computer Interaction series (associated with the HCI group of the German Computer Science Society) and has edited a book on Personalized HCI. Mirjam has been serving on the PC or as a reviewer at several top-tier ACM conferences in the area of HCI (e.g., CHI, CSCW, ISS, ICMI, TEI or DIS).

Johannes Schönböck is Professor for Social and Semantic Web at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg campus. He earned a PhD from Johannes Kepler University Linz and Technical University Vienna with the greatest honors obtainable in the federal republic of Austria sub auspiciis Praesidentis.

Tuire Oittinen is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Jyväskylä. She received her PhD from the University of Jyväskylä, focusing on the coordination of actions in technology-mediated business meetings. In her current research, she uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to study human social conduct in authentic technology-mediated and hybrid collaborative settings. Tuire is the principal investigator of the project ‘Participation and collaboration in hybrid interactional ecologies of learning’, and she is the co-editor of a book ‘Video-mediated L2 interaction: Conversation analytic research’.

Minttu Vänttinen is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. She received her PhD from the University of Jyväskylä, where her research focused on interaction around and via technology in face-to-face and hybrid educational settings. She uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) and other qualitative methods to study technologized interaction, digital game-based learning, and collaboration in hybrid spaces.

Acknowledgements

The research project HYCOS involved with the organization of the workshop is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) with funding number P 34928