COWORK: A Method to Discuss Conventions on Digital Cooperative Practices

Conventions, shared agreements, and related practices play a key role in structuring cooperative work, even if they often remain implicit and rarely discussed collectively. While prior work has highlighted their importance for supporting coordination, little is known about how such conventions can be made visible and reflected upon without being formalized or turned into prescriptive rules. This paper examines COWORK (Conventions Oriented Workshops for Reflexivity), a method to support the discussion of conventions and foster reflexivity around shared but implicit digital cooperative practices. We present COWORK and report on its application with participants from the administrative staff at a university. We discuss how COWORK supports reflexivity by fostering awareness and interpretation of practices in cooperative work.