Location awareness and serendipity

Informal interactions between individuals nurture relationships by building trust. Trust, in turn, is a necessary component for creating social ties. In the professional world these ties can lead to a number of ancillary (but critical) benefits, including collaboration opportunities or the chance to be mentored by a knowledgeable coworker. Kraut and his colleagues (1990) investigated the ways in which coworkers interact in communal office spaces. They found that fully one third of all communication between colleagues is spontaneous--in other words, it is unplanned and (oftentimes) occurs on neutral territory in shared spaces such as at the water cooler, in the hallways, or near the coffee maker. Another 20% of interactions were found to be opportunistic--that is, situations in which one of the actors behaves as a sort of interloper, who sees an opportunity to chat with another colleague about a pertinent matter and then seizes on it. Thus, fully half of the face-to-face interactions that occur within the walls of an organization can be categorized as "informal". Specifically, they transpire outside of the more formal avenues for engagement (principally, the scheduled meeting). And, a crucial factor underlying these interactions is proximity. Having an unplanned, face-to-face meeting with a colleague is usually only possible when both parties happen to cross paths accidentally.

Because these chance encounters make up a huge portion of the interactions that take place within the confines of an office space, colleagues who regularly conduct business away from this setting miss out. Instead, many of the interactions they have with colleagues are scheduled in advance--or take place on the phone, over email, or via the use of IM. Not only does the use of such methods make communication more formal, in the case of the phone, email, and IM these mediums also lacks the richness of face-to-face interaction (Daft & Lengel, 1986). So, in the end, highly mobile and nomadic workers are confronted with few opportunities to enage in informal interactions with colleagues like the kind more traditional workers have access to.

The apparent cost for the nomadic worker is that with fewer opportunities to engage in informal exchange, the fewer opportunities they will encounter for possible future collaborations, exchange knowledge, or even foster social bonds (which, in turn, builds the trust necessary to collaborate or share knowledge effectively). In short, it leaves the nomad out of the loop.

Mobile location awareness technology can be used to draw the nomad back into the loop. A recent NYT's article discusses a few of the pros and cons of this technology--a notable recent example of which is Google Latitude. The application allows users to notify contacts of their physical location with varying degrees of specificity (i.e., country, city, or street), along with status updates.

It can be argued that the benefit of such technology is that it would allow the nomadic worker to meet-up, on the fly, with collaborators who are in close proximity. In the NYT article, that's precisely what the creator of another social location mobile application, Loopt, describes having done when he used the information from his contacts to spontaneously meet up with friends for drinks at a mutually convenient location. However, it must be underscored this particular individual helped bring location awareness to the mobile market--so, it's not really surprising that he regularly makes use of it! I can't help but wonder how others might use such information, in practice? For the average user, can location awareness facilitate serendipitous meetings, thus drawing them back into the loop? Or is it more likely that he or she would use it to see where an colleague is currently located (in the office, for example) and use it to help make a judgment about whether or not to contact that person on the phone?