Embracing Chaos Again: Tracing Boundary Negotiating Artifacts in Knowledge Workers’ Data Practices for Collaborative Public Health Crisis Response

Paper Title

Embracing Chaos Again: Tracing Boundary Negotiating Artifacts in Knowledge Workers’ Data Practices for Collaborative Public Health Crisis Response

Publication Info

• Topic area: Collaborative data practices in public health crisis response.
• Keywords: Boundary negotiating artifacts, public health crisis, COVID-19, data collaboration, knowledge workers, cross-sector partnerships, sociotechnical arrangements, political sensitivity, data sharing, sensemaking.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Limited understanding of how university-government collaborations unfold in non-routine, complex settings during public health crises, especially regarding knowledge workers' data practices and the role of artifacts.
• Significance: Effective data sharing during crises enhances situational awareness, resource integration, and public communication, but fragmented sources and political sensitivities complicate collaboration.
• Motivation and related work: Previous studies in HCI, CSCW, and crisis informatics have explored cross-boundary collaboration and information sharing, but primarily in contexts like natural disasters. Few have examined how evolving data in public health crises is transformed into actionable knowledge, nor the specific challenges faced by university personnel collaborating with government entities.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A case study analyzing a data partnership between an interdisciplinary university team and a state health department during the COVID-19 pandemic, using Boundary Negotiating Artifacts (BNA) theory.
• Novelty:
  1. Empirical insights into government–academic data partnerships as an understudied collaboration mode.
  2. Extension of BNA theory to highly chaotic, politically sensitive collaborations.
  3. Identification of sociotechnical arrangements that sustain collaboration when artifacts are absent or ineffective.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with university personnel involved in developing pandemic response tools.
  • Analyzed project-related materials (e.g., data dictionaries, organizational charts, prototypes).
  • Applied qualitative coding to identify challenges, artifacts, and sociotechnical arrangements.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Five key challenges: volatile data, misaligned expectations, mixed roles, external pressures, and authority asymmetries.
  • Artifacts like data documentation and standards were often absent or ineffective, requiring ad hoc substitutes.
  • Sociotechnical arrangements (adaptive communication, improvised workflows, role configurations, value systems) were critical for sustaining collaboration.
• Advantage over baselines: Demonstrates the fragility of artifacts in chaotic collaborations and the importance of sociotechnical arrangements for sensemaking and negotiation.
• Experiments / evaluation: Case study methodology; triangulated interview data with documents such as project slide decks, data dictionaries, and prototypes.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Lack of direct input from state officials limits understanding of cross-sector dynamics.
  • Participants may have self-edited responses due to ongoing relationships with collaborators.
  • Future research should analyze additional artifacts and broader collaboration contexts.

Summary

This study investigates university personnel's data practices in a chaotic collaboration with a state health department during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Boundary Negotiating Artifacts (BNA) theory, it identifies challenges such as volatile data and authority asymmetries, revealing that artifacts were often absent or ineffective. Instead, sociotechnical arrangements like adaptive communication and improvised workflows sustained collaboration. The findings enrich BNA theory by extending its applicability to highly non-routine, complex, and politically sensitive settings, offering design opportunities for better artifact and workflow support in crisis-driven collaborations.