The ACM CSCW conference is a leading forum for presenting and discussing research and development achievements concerning the use of computer technologies to support collaborative activities, as well as the impact of digital collaboration technologies on users, groups, organizations and society.
“This paper examines the relationship between cooperative work and the wider organizational context. The purpose of the exploration is not to contribute to organizational theory in general, but to critique the transaction cost approach to organizational theory from the point of view of cooperative work. The paper posits that the formal conception of organization -- organization conceived of in terms of "common ownership" -- is inadequate as a conceptual foundation for embedding CSCW systems in a wider organizational context. The design of CSCW systems for real-world application must move beyond the bounds of organizational forms conceived of in terms of "common ownership."”
“Workflow management is a technology that is considered strategically important by many businesses, and its market growth shows no signs of abating. It is, however, often viewed with skepticism by the research community, conjuring up visions of oppressed workers performing rigidly-defined tasks on an assembly line. Although the potential for abuse no doubt exists, workflow management can instead be used to help individuals manage their work and to provide a clear context for performing that work. A key challenge in the realization of this ideal is the reconciliation of workflow process models and software with the rich variety of activities and behaviors that comprise "real" work. Our experiences with the InConcert workflow management system are used as a basis for outlining several issues that will need to be addressed in meeting this challenge. This is intended as an invitation to CSCW researchers to influence this important technology in a constructive manner by drawing on research and experience.”
“The correct and timely creation of systems for coordination of group work depends on the ability to express, analyze, and experiment with protocols for managing multiple work threads. We present an evolution of the Trellis model that provides a formal basis for prototyping the coordination structure of a collaboration system. In Trellis, group interaction protocols are represented separately from the interface processes that use them for coordination. Protocols are interpreted (rather than compiled into applications) so group interactions can be changed as a collaborative task progresses. Changes can be made either by a person editing the protocol specification "on the fly" or by a silent "observation" process that participates in an application solely to perform behavioral adaptations. Trellis uniquely mixes hypermedia browsing with collaboration support. We term this combination a hyperprogram, and we say that a hyperprogram integrates the description of a collaborative task with the information required for that task. As illustration, we describe a protocol for a moderated meeting and show a Trellis prototype conference tool controlled by this protocol.”
“This field experiment investigates individual, structural and social influences on the use of two video telephone systems. One system flourished, while an equivalent system died. We use a time series design and multiple data sources to test media richness theory, critical mass theory, and social influence theories about new media use. Results show that the fit between tasks and features of the communications medium influences use to a degree, but cannot explain why only one system survived. Critical mass -- the numbers of people one can reach on a system -- and social influence -- the norms that grow up around a new medium -- can explain this phenomenon.”
“The Virtual Notebook System (VNS) is a distributed collaborative hypertext system that has made a successful transition from research prototype to commercial product. Experience in developing and deploying the VNS in diverse settings including biomedical research, undergraduate education, and collaborative system prototyping has developed insight into the use of systems for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). This paper provides a brief overview of the VNS, discusses some of its strengths and weaknesses with respect to collaboration, and draws some conclusions about the impact of metaphor and extensibility on the collaborative process.”
“This paper reports research to define a sat of interaction parameters that collaborative writers will find useful. Our approach is to provide parameters of interaction and to locate the decision of how to set the parameters with the users. What is new in this paper is the progress we have made outlining task management parameters, notification, scenarios of use, as well as some implementation architectures.”
“The ability to share synchronized views of interactions with an application is critical to supporting synchronous collaboration. This paper suggests a simple synchronous collaboration paradigm in which the sharing of the views of user/application interactions occurs at the window level within a multi-user, multi-window application. The paradigm is incorporated in a toolkit, DistView, that allows some of the application windows to be shared at a fine-level of granularity, while still allowing other application windows to be private. The toolkit is intended for supporting synchronous collaboration over wide-area networks. To keep bandwidth requirements and interactive response time low in such networks, DistView uses an object-level replication scheme, in which the application and interface objects that need to be shared among users are replicated. We discuss the design of DistView and present our preliminary experience with a prototype version of the system.”
“DUPLEX is a distributed collaborative editor for users connected through a large-scale environment such as the Internet. Large-scale implies heterogeneity, unpredictable communication delays and failures, and inefficient implementations of techniques traditionally used for collaborative editing in local area networks. To cope with these unfavorable conditions, DUPLEX proposes a model based on splitting the document into independent parts, maintained individually and replicated by a kernel. Users act on document parts and interact with co-authors using a local environment providing a safe store and recovery mechanisms against failures or divergence with co-authors. Communication is reduced to a minimum, allowing disconnected operation. Atomicity, concurrency, and replica control are confined to a manageable small context.”
“Collaborative filters help people make choices based on the opinions of other people. GroupLens is a system for collaborative filtering of netnews, to help people find articles they will like in the huge stream of available articles. News reader clients display predicted scores and make it easy for users to rate articles after they read them. Rating servers, called Better Bit Bureaus, gather and disseminate the ratings. The rating servers predict scores based on the heuristic that people who agreed in the past will probably agree again. Users can protect their privacy by entering ratings under pseudonyms, without reducing the effectiveness of the score prediction. The entire architecture is open: alternative software for news clients and Better Bit Bureaus can be developed independently and can interoperate with the components we have developed.”
“Current collaborative learning systems focus on maximizing shared information. However, "meaningful learning" is not simply information sharing but, more importantly, knowledge construction. CLARE is a computer-supported learning environment that facilitates meaningful learning through collaborative knowledge construction. CLARE provides a semi-formal representation language called RESRA and an explicit process model called SECAI. Experimental evaluation through 300 hours of classroom usage indicates that CLARE does support meaningful learning, and that a major bottleneck to computer-mediated knowledge construction is summarization. Lessons learned through the design and evaluation of CLARE provide new insights into both collaborative learning systems and collaborative learning theories.”
“Summary reports are the periodic assemblings of text, numbers, and other data, drawn from diverse sources to present a picture of some aspect of an organization's state. They have become ubiquitous in organizations with the advent of computers, but are not always as useful as their readers would like them to be. This paper focuses on the meaning-making work that report contributors and readers must do in order for reports to be useful and presents some examples drawn from everyday interactions in a business unit of a large corporation. The paper uses these examples as a foundation for asking what it might mean to purposefully support meaning-making in organizational reporting.”
“This paper exposes the concurrency control problem in groupware when it is implemented as a distributed system. Traditional concurrency control methods cannot be applied directly to groupware because system interactions include people as well as computers. Methods, such as locking, serialization, and their degree of optimism, are shown to have quite different impacts on the interface and how operations are displayed and perceived by group members. The paper considers both human and technical considerations that designers should ponder before choosing a particular concurrency control method. It also reviews our work-in-progress designing and implementing a library of concurrency schemes in GROUPKIT, a groupware toolkit.”
“This paper examines the importance of providing effective management of sharing in cooperative systems and argues for a specialised service to support the cooperative aspects of information sharing. The relationship between features of the cooperative shared object service and existing services is briefly examined. A number of management services of particular importance to CSCW systems are identified. The paper presents a technique of realising a shared object service by augmenting existing object facilities to provide management of their cooperative use. These facilities are realised through object adapters that provide additional cooperative facilities and greater control over the supporting infrastructure.”
“The Montage prototype provides lightweight audio-video glances among distributed collaborators and integrates other applications for coordinating future contact. We studied a distributed group across three conditions: before installing Montage, with Montage, and after removing Montage. We collected quantitative measures of usage as well as videotape and user perception data. We found that the group used Montage glances for short, lightweight interactions that were like face-to-face conversations in many respects. Yet like the phone, Montage offered convenient access to other people without leaving the office. Most glances revealed that the person was not available, so it was important to integrate other tools for coordinating future interaction. Montage did not appear to displace the use of e-mail, voice-mail, or scheduled meetings.”
“The need to merge different versions of an object to a common state arises in collaborative computing due to several reasons including optimistic concurrency control, asynchronous coupling, and absence of access control. We have developed a flexible object merging framework that allows definition of the merge policy based on the particular application and the context of the collaborative activity. It performs automatic, semi-automatic, and interactive merges, supports semantics-determined merges, operates on objects with arbitrary structure and semantics, and allows fine-grained specification of merge policies. It is based on an existing collaborative applications framework and consists of a merge matrix, which defines merge functions and their parameters and allows definition of multiple merge policies, and a merge algorithm, which performs the merge based on the results computed by the merge functions. In conjunction with our framework we introduce a set of merge policies for several useful kinds of merges we have identified. This paper motivates the need for a general approach to merging, identifies some important merging issues, surveys previous research in merging, identifies a list of merge requirements, describes our merging framework and illustrates it with examples, and evaluates the framework with respect to the requirements and other research efforts in merging objects.”
“A growing concern for organizations and groups has been to augment their knowledge and expertise. One such augmentation is to provide an organizational memory, some record of the organization's knowledge. However, relatively little is known about how computer systems might enhance organizational, group, or community memory. This paper presents findings from a field study of one such organizational memory system, the Answer Garden. The paper discusses the usage data and qualitative evaluations from the field study, and then draws a set of lessons for next-generation organizational memory systems.”
“This paper analyzes the initial phases of a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community System (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user feedback and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual tradeoffs. Using Bateson's levels of learning, we characterize these as levels of infrastructural complexity which challenge both users and developers. Usage problems may result from different perceptions of this complexity in different organizational contexts.”
“The pattern of CSCW system users helping other users to resolve problems and make more effective use of such tools has been observed in a variety of settings, but little is known about how help patterns develop or their effects. Results from a pre-post study of the implementation of CSCW tools among university faculty, staff and administration indicate that the network of helping relationships is largely disaggregated and generally follows work group alignments rather than technical specialization. A relatively small group of "high providers" is responsible for most help to users, and tends to act as a liaison between central support staff and work group members. These providers are not systematically different from other personnel except in terms of their expertise. Implications of these findings for the development and cultivation of help relationships in support of CSCW are developed.”
“Ethnographic studies of CSCW have often seemed to involve the investigation of relatively large-scale and highly specific systems, consequently ignoring the small office within which many people spend much of their working lives and which is a major site for the introduction and implementation of IT. This paper is concerned with a "quick and dirty" ethnographic study of a small office that was considering the introduction of greater levels of IT. Generic features of office work are outlined: the process of work in a small office and its recurrent features, notably the massive volume of paperwork; the importance of local knowledge in the accomplishment of work; and the phenomenon of "constant interruption." This paper suggests that despite the obvious contrasts with work settings analysed in other ethnographic studies, similar features of cooperative work can be observed in the small office. It further suggests that the issues of cooperation and the sociality of work cannot be ignored even in small-scale system design.”
“This paper reports on a field study of the procurement, implementation and use of a local area network devoted to running CSCW-related applications in an organization within the U.K.'s central government. In this particular case, the network ran into a number of difficulties, was resisted by its potential users for a variety of reasons, was faced with being withdrawn from service on a number of occasions and (at the time of writing) remains only partly used. The study points to the kinds of problems that a project to introduce computer support for cooperative work to an actual organization is likely to face and a series of concepts are offered to help manage the complexity of these problems. In so doing, this paper adds to and extends previous studies of CSCW tools in action but also argues that experience from the field should be used to re-organise the research agenda of CSCW.”
“Computer-mediated small group research has focused efforts on the medium of electronically networked text-based messages. An experiment which instead combines a synchronous text-based messaging medium with two-dimensional interactive computer graphics is detailed. Three-person groups participated in a risk-taking choice-dilemma task involving a discussion of the dilemma and consensus attainment. The groups' prediscussion and postdiscussion opinions were collected. Two conditions, one where groups received graphics-based feedback of their individual prediscussion opinions, and a second, which included a graphical representation of the prediscussion average, were coupled with a text-based communication medium. The text-based medium, without interactive graphics, served as control. In the condition involving the graphical prediscussion opinions and average, groups sent proportionately more messages containing persuasive-style arguments and proportionately fewer messages containing normative-style arguments. In the graphical condition without the average, roughly the inverse was found to occur. In the control, the discussion parameters fell proportionately between the two graphics conditions. In both graphics conditions, the first discussant to advocate a decision proposal had a stronger influence on the group decision than in the control. The data suggests that the inclusion of two-dimensional graphics can either augment or inhibit normative and informational forms of social influence during the group decision-making process.”
“This paper presents AlphaDeltaPhi-groups (ADP-group) as a communication tool for connection level management in distributed CSCW systems. In order to accurately model CSCW communication patterns, an ADP-group is a related set of cooperating processes whose communication is supported by allowing a spectrum of quality-of-service, message delivery reliability, atomicity and causal ordering options to co-exist within the same group. ADP-group communication provides appropriate connection management support and network control within distributed CSCW environments characterized by a heterogeneous mixture of equipment types, network performance and user activity levels. This efficiency is achieved by defining a small set of canonical group communication operations, by automatically making appropriate connections between data sources and sinks, and by using a receiver-based method of connection specification, monitoring and modification.”
“Session management systems for collaborative applications have required a great deal of reimplementation work by developers because they have been typically created on a case-by-case basis. Further, artifacts of this development process have limited the flexibility of session management systems and their ability to cooperate across applications, resulting in the fairly formalized, heavy-weight session management found in most collaborative systems today. We present a model for a light-weight form of session management, the theoretical foundation for this model (based on the sharing of information about user and system activity), and details of a collaboration support environment which implements our session management model.”
“DIVA, a novel environment for group work, is presented. This prototype virtual office environment provides support for communication, cooperation, and awareness in both the synchronous and asynchronous modes, smoothly integrated into a simple and intuitive interface which may be viewed as a replacement for the standard graphical user interface desktop. In order to utilize the skills that people have acquired through years of shared work in real offices, DIVA is modeled after the standard office, abstracting elements of physical offices required to support collaborative work: people, rooms, desks, and documents.”
“This paper describes DOLPHIN, a fully group aware application designed to provide computer support for different types of meetings: face-to-face meetings with a large interactive electronic whiteboard with or without networked computers provided for the participants, extensions of these meetings with remote participants at their desktop computers connected via computer and audio/video networks, and/or participants in a second meeting room also provided with an electronic whiteboard as well as networked computers. DOLPHIN supports the creation and manipulation of informal structures (e.g., freehand drawings, handwritten scribbles), formal structures (e.g., hypermedia documents with typed nodes and links), their coexistence, and their transformation.”
“An approach supporting spatial workspace collaboration via a video-mediated communication system is described. Based on experimental results, the following were determined to be the system requirements to support spatial workspace collaboration: independency of a field of view, predictability, confidence in transmission and sympathy toward the system. Additionally, a newly developed camera system, the GestureCam System, is introduced. A camera is mounted on an actuator with three degrees of freedom. It is controlled by master-slave method or by a touch-sensitive CRT. Also, a laser pointer is mounted to assist with remote pointing. Preliminary experiments were conducted and the results are described herein.”
“In this paper we present three scheduling mechanisms that are manipulation-proof for closed systems. The amount of information that each user must encode in the mechanism increases with the complexity of the mechanism. On the other hand, the more complex the mechanism is, the more it maintains the privacy of the users. The first mechanism is a centralized, calendar-oriented one. It is the least computationally complex of the three, but does not maintain user privacy. The second is a distributed meeting-oriented mechanism that maintains user privacy, but at the cost of greater computational complexity. The third mechanism, while being the most complex, maintains user privacy (for the most part) and allows users to have the greatest influence on the resulting schedule.”
“We analyse eighteen months of national and international deployment of a prototype telemeeting system supporting synchronous remote meetings which make extensive use of shared documents as well as video and audio conferencing. Logistics of a telemeeting include scheduling people and equipment, document format conversion, pre-sending documents, training, equipment and call setup, and meeting followup. The logistics burden is much larger than expected and can be a barrier to adoption of telemeeting technology. Using a process model that recognises moving between solo and group, asynchronous and synchronous work modes, the paper explores the amenability of individual logistics tasks to automated assistance, proposes a framework for such assistance, and develops a set of design principles.”
“This paper describes the design and implementation of MAJIC, a multi-party videoconferencing system that projects life-size video images of participants onto a large curved screen as if users in various locations are attending a meeting together and sitting around a table. MAJIC also supports multiple eye contact among the participants and awareness of the direction of the participants' gaze. Hence, users can carry on a discussion in a manner comparable to face-to-face meetings. We made video-tape recordings of about twenty visitors who used the prototype of MAJIC at the Nikkei Collaboration Fair in Tokyo. Our initial observations based on this experiment are also reported in this paper.”
“We describe a scalable CSCW infrastructure designed to handle heavy-weight data sets, such as extremely large images and video. Scalability is achieved through exclusive use of reliable and unreliable multicast protocols. The infrastructure uses a replicated architecture rather than a centralized architecture, both to reduce latency and to improve responsiveness. Use of 1) reliable (multicast) transport of absolute, rather than relative, information sets, 2) time stamps, and 3) a last-in-wins policy provide coherency often lacking in replicated architectures. The infrastructure allows users to toggle between WYSIWIS and non-WYSIWIS modes. That, coupled with effective use of multicast groups, allows greatly improved responsiveness and performance for managing heavy-weight data.”
“Computer technology is available to build video-based tools for supporting presentations to distributed audiences, but it is unclear how such an environment affects participants' ability to interact and to learn. We built and tested a tool called Forum that broadcasts live audio, video and slides from a speaker, and enables audiences to interact with the speaker and other audience members in a variety of ways. The challenge was to enable effective interactions while overcoming obstacles introduced by the distributed nature of the environment, the large size of the group, and the asymmetric roles of the participants. Forum was most successful in enabling effective presentations in cases when the topic sparked a great deal of audience participation or when the purpose of the talk was mostly informational and did not require a great deal of interaction. We are exploring ways to enhance Forum to expand the effectiveness of this technology.”
“This paper addresses some of the divergences between social sciences, and proposes the development of hybrid forms of participation in CSCW. It offers a critique of the theoretical isolationism of some ethnomethodological ethnography. It reviews the prospects for interdisciplinary collaboration, and seeks to motivate it with some "core propositions" which expose the inescapable character of the problems (although not necessarily of the solutions) which are "owned" by different disciplines. It illustrates hybrid forms with discussion of some issues in two areas: the cognitive versus the ethnographic; it further describes the politics of participation.”
“Ethnography has gained considerable prominence as a technique for informing CSCW systems development of the nature of work. Experiences of ethnography reported to date have focused on the use of prolonged on-going ethnography to inform systems design. A considerable number of these studies have taken place within constrained and focused work domain. This paper reflects more generally on the experiences of using ethnography across a number of different projects and in a variety of domains of study. We identify a number of ways in which we have used ethnography to inform design and consider the benefits and problems of each.”
“This paper discusses an evaluation of the MEAD prototype, a multi-user interface generator tool particularly for use in the context of Air Traffic Control (ATC). The procedures we adopted took the form of opportunistic and informal evaluation sessions with small user groups, including Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs). We argue that informal procedures are a powerful and cost effective method for dealing with specific evaluation issues in the context of CSCW but that wider issues are more problematic. Most notably, identifying the "validity" or otherwise of CSCW systems requires that the context of use be taken seriously, necessitating a fundamental re-appraisal of the concept of evaluation.”
“In this paper, we look at how people working in a governmental labor inspection agency tailor their shared PC environment. Starting with standard off-the-shelf software, the tailors adapt that software to the particular workplace in which they are embedded, at the same time that they modify and extend the practices of that workplace. Over time, their adaptations and the tailoring processes themselves become structured and systematized within the organization. This tendency toward systematization is in part a response to the requirement that the results of tailoring be sharable across groups of users. Our study focuses on several dimensions of the work of tailoring: construction, organizational change, learning, and politics. We draw two kinds of lessons for system development: how better to support the work of tailors, and how system developers can learn from and cooperate with tailors.”
“This study found that the use of a computer conferencing system in an R&D lab was significantly shaped by a set of intervening actors -- mediators -- who actively guided and manipulated the technology and its use over time. These mediators adapted the technology to its initial context and shaped user interaction with it; over time, they continued to modify the technology and influence use patterns to respond to changing circumstances. We argue that well-managed mediation may be a useful mechanism for shaping technologies to evolving contexts of use, and that it extends our understanding of the powerful role that intervenors can play in helping CSCW applications succeed.”
“Integrating CSCW systems to organisations is highly complex. This paper examines the co-evolution process involved in tailoring a CSCW system to fit in with the current organisational structure, whilst concurrently adapting the working practices to enable the system to support collaboration. A study is presented which analyses the various obstacles and inequities that ensue when a multi-user system is implemented in a company. To facilitate the management and resolution of the emergent problems, a preliminary conceptual framework is outlined. Finally, a case is presented for involving intermediaries in helping companies customise CSCW systems and adapt their work practices.”
“This paper discusses a conceptual model of groupware consisting of three complementary components or models: a description of the objects and operations on these objects available in the system; a description of the activities (and their orderings) that the users of the system can perform; and a description of the interface of users with the system, and with other users.”
“The debate on the language/action perspective has been receiving attention in the CSCW field for almost ten years. In this paper, we recall the most relevant issues raised during this debate, and propose a new exploitation of the language/action perspective by considering it from the viewpoint of understanding the complexity of communication within work processes and the situatedness of work practices. On this basis, we have defined a new conversation model, the Milan Conversation Model, and we are designing a new conversation handler to implement it.”
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Mar 22nd, 2010
