Domino: A descriptive framework for hybrid collaboration and coupling styles in partially distributed teams

We present Domino, a descriptive framework for hybrid collaboration and hybrid coupling styles in partially distributed teams. Domino enables researchers to describe, analyze, and understand real-world hybrid collaboration practices, i.e., collaborative practices that involve simultaneous co-located and remote collaboration with phases of both synchronous and asynchronous work that spans multiple groupware applications and devices. It also helps to categorize collaborative activities based on yet undocumented hybrid coupling styles between the members of multiple partially distributed or co-located subgroups. Our Domino framework was derived from initial observations of real-world practice and refined by the detailed analysis of participants’ behavior and working styles during a simulation of a complex hybrid collaboration task with six partially distributed teams of four users in our lab. The resulting framework allows researchers to view collaboration through a new analytical lens, apply new analytical tools, and also derive implications for the design of collaborative systems.