Question: do yo enjoy working with other people?

Jodi Schneider answered on 11 Nov 2014:

Working with other people is one of the best parts of my job!

In France, I’m working with 2 groups of people:
* 1 group is designing a “user study”. In a user study, we watch how people use computer systems–with their permission. We watch with our eyes and ears — and we can also make recordings so that we can review everything later. And we ask people to fill out questionnaires that we analyse.

* the other group is researching online discussions. We’re particularly interested in “rationale” (when people give reasons — like pro & con lists in a book review) and in arguments.

I also work with people in other countries. We meet by telephone — usually on skype or on webconferencing software that lets us all look at one person’s screen. The two main projects I’m working on are:

* Studying Wikipedia — with researchers from the Wikimedia Foundation and New York University

* Figuring out how to improve medication safety information — in a project run by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, USA.

The cool thing about working with people who are far away is that sometimes I get to visit them. Last week after a conference, I met one of my medication safety colleagues for the first time, in Seattle, Washington. And next week I’ll visit a research lab at Harvard/Mass General Hospital for the day. I try to take advantage of travel to meet people in person, even though I still have colleagues I’ve never met!