Home Page for Margaret
S. Elliott
Position: Research Specialist
Area: Software
Office: ICS2-241
US mail: Margaret S. Elliott
Institute for Software Research
School of Information and Computer Science
University of California
Irvine, CA 92697-3425 USA
Other: Tel: +1-949-824-8756
Fax: +1-949-824-1715
E-mail: melliott@ics.uci.edu
Web: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~melliott
Margaret's CV can be found in (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~melliott/resumeweb.htm).
Research Interests
- Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Environments
- Studies of Free/Open Source Software Development Communities
- Organizational Cultures in Typical and Virtual Organizations
- Social Processes Involved in Free/Open Source Software Development Communities
- Computing Cultures in Organizations
- Occupational Communities
- Requirements Engineering in Large-Scale Institutional Settings
Current Research Projects
My current projects include the study of free/open source software development communities as occupational communities and of how their beliefs, values, and norms regarding free/open source software influence work practices in a virtual community, and the study of the organizational culture of criminal courts and how it influences technology use. I am especially intrigued by the way that computing can alter work practices and influence or reinforce organizational culture beliefs and values. I am also interested in the modeling of free/open source software development techniques in order to compare them to typical software development methods in a "closed" environment with the goal of identifying which free/open source software development techniques might be used successfully in typical software development organizations.
Previous Research Projects
- Study of influence of IT usage for case processing on the organizational culture in the Los Angeles County Criminal Courts.
- Organizational Usability of Digital Libraries.
- Organizational Usability of Manufacturing Systems for the Advanced Integrated Manufacturing Environments (AIME) project.
- Development
of Artificial Intelligence Systems to Assist in Fault Tree Analysis.
Projects
- Open Source Project - funded by the National Science Foundation #IIS-0083075. The goal of the project is to understand how open source communities build reliable software systems through their socio-technical work structures and processes. I am using an organizational culture perspective to characterize virtual communities. I am looking at how the work culture influences work practices associated with software development and how work practices reinforce or modify the work culture. See the website on this NSF-sponsored Open Source Project (http://www.isr.uci.edu/research-open-source.html).
- Free Software Case Study - This research entails an ethnography of a free software development virtual community. The study shows how the work culture of a free software development community influenced decisions regarding tool choice and contributed to mitigation and resolution of conflict. For a detailed technical report on this study see (http://www.ics.uci.edu/tech_reports/UCI-ISR-03-6.pdf).
- Court Technology Project - This is a continuing project of the analysis of data collected during a five-year ethnography of the work culture of the Los Angeles County Criminal Justice system and their use of technology. An organizational culture perspective is being used to characterize the groups of district attorneys, public defenders, judges and court clerks as occupational communities. This study focuses on how the work practices of the four groups are influenced by technology innovation and how the technology reinforces or modifies the work culture of each group.
Selected Publications and Working Papers
Elliott, M. (2003). The Virtual Organizational Culture of a Free Software Development
Community. Paper
presented at the 3rd Workshop on Open Source Software,
Elliott, M. (2002). Computing in a Virtual Organizational Culture:
Open Software Communities as Occupational Subcultures. Working Paper. Institute
for Software Research,
Elliott, M. (2000). Organizational Culture and Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work in a Common Information Space: Case Processing in the
Criminal Courts. Unpublished Dissertation. Department
of Information and Computer Science,
Elliott,
M. (1999). Final Report on Case
Management Evaluation SJI-98-T-007.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~melliott/reports/Elliott-CaseMan-Final-99.pdf
Elliott, M. (1999). Final Report on Case Management Evaluation SJI-98-T-007.
Elliott, M. (1997). Moving from Paper-based to Digital Documents:
Case Study of Public Defenders Using Case Management and Legal Research
Tools. Paper presented at the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference
on System Sciences,
Elliott, M. (1995). Empirical Study of Video Conferencing on the Mbone. In Proceedings
of 1995 Pacific Workshop on Distributed Multimedia Systems,
Elliott, M. (1995). National Information Infrastructure Research at
Elliott, M. (1994). Computer-assisted Fault Tree Construction Using a Knowledge-based Approach. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 43(1), 112-120.
Elliott, M. (1990). Knowledge-based systems for reliability analysis. In 1990 Proceedings Annual Reliability and Maintainability
Symposium,
Elliott, M. (1989). Knowledge-based systems for reliability analysis
in concurrent design. In Proceedings IJCAI-89 Concurrent Engineering
Design Workshop, IJCAI-89,
Elliott, M., & King,
J. (1996). From OJ to OK: Lessons from the
Use of Emergent CSCW Technologies in
Elliott, M., & Kling,
R. (1996 ). Organizational Usability of digital
libraries in the courts. Paper presented at the 29th
Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,
Elliott, M., & Kling, R. (1997). Organizational Usability of digital libraries: Case study of legal research in civil and criminal courts. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(11), (1023-1035).
Elliott, M. and Kling, R. (1997). Organizational Usability of Digital Libraries: Case Study of Legal Research in Civil and Criminal Courts. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(11), 1023-1035.
Elliott,
M. & Scacchi, W. (2003a). Free
Software: A Case Study of Software Development in
A Virtual Organizational Culture. Working Paper.
(http://www.ics.uci.edu/tech_reports/UCI-ISR-03-6.pdf)
Elliott, M. & Scacchi, W. (2003b). Conflict Management in an Occupational Community for Free Software Development. In GROUP'03 International Conference on Supporting Group Work.
(http://www.ics.uci.edu/~melliott/papers/Elliott-Scacchi-GROUP-03.pdf)
Elliott,
M. & Scacchi, W. (2004). Free Software Development: Cooperation and Conflict in a Virtual Organizational Culture.
To appear in S. Koch (Ed.), Free/Open Source Software Development:
Idea Press.
(http://www.ics.uci.edu/~melliott/papers/Elliott-Scacchi-BookChapter.pdf)
Elliott, M. and Scacchi, W. (2002). Communicating
and Mitigating Conflict in Open Source Development Projects. Working Paper. Institute
for Software Research,
Kling, R. & Elliott,
M. (1994). Digital Library Design for Usability. In Schnase, J., Leggett,
J., Furuta, R. K., and Metcalfe, T. (Eds.). In Proceedings Digital Libraries '94 Conference.
O'Rorke, P., El Fattah,
Y., and Elliott, M. (1993a). Explaining and Generalizaing
Diagnostic Decisions. In P. E. Utgoff (Ed.), Machine Learning: Proceedings of the
Tenth International Conference,
O'Rorke, P., El Fattah,
Y., and Elliott, M. (1993b). Explanation-based Learning for Qualitative
Decision-making. In N. Piera-Carrete
(Ed.), Proceedings of the Third IMACS International Workshop on Qualitative
Reasoning and Decision Technologies,
Invited Talks
Talk on “The Virtual
Organizational Culture of a Free Software Development Community”, 3rd
Workshop on Open Source Software,
Presentations
Paper presentation at GROUP'03:http://www.ics.uci.edu/~melliott/presentations/GROUP03a.pdf
Personal Interests
- Enjoying time with my five-year old triplets.
- Playing the piano.
Family Pictures
Click for
picture of two triplets
Click for picture of one triplet
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