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.
“We report on an investigation of using Usenet newsgroups for social filtering of Web resources. Our main empirical results are: (1) for the period of May '96 to Jul '96, about 23% of Usenet news messages mention Web resources, (2) 19% of resource mentions are recommendations (as opposed, e.g., to home pages), (3) we can automatically recognize recommendations with at least 90% accuracy, and (4) in some newsgroups, certain resources are mentioned significantly more frequently than others and thus appear to play a central role for that community. We have created a Web site that summarizes the most frequently and recently mentioned Web resources for 1400 newsgroups.”
“Collaborative systems provide a rich but potentially chaotic environment for their users. This paper presents a system that allows users to control collaboration by enacting policies that serve as general guidelines to restrict and define the behavior of the system in reaction to the state of the world. Policies are described in terms of access control rights on data objects, and are assigned to groups of users called roles. Roles represent not only statically-defined collections of users, but also dynamic descriptions of users that are evaluated as applications are run. This run-time aspect of roles allows them to react flexibly to the dynamism inherent in collaboration. We present a specification language for describing roles and policies, as well as a number of common "real-world" policies that can be applied to collaborative settings.”
“Workgroups that defy traditional boundaries require successful communication among people whose interests, schedules, and locations may differ and are likely to change rapidly. CLUES is a dynamic personalized message filter that facilitates effective communication by prioritizing voice and text messages using personal information found in an individual's work environment. CLUES infers message timeliness by considering calendar appointments, outgoing messages and phone calls, and by correlating these "clues" via a personal rolodex. Experience shows that CLUES can be especially useful to mobile users with high message traffic who often access their messages over the telephone.”
“We introduce the Notification Service Transfer Protocol (NSTP), which provides a simple, common service for sharing state in synchronous multi-user applications. A Notification Server provides items of shared state to a collection of clients and notifies the clients whenever one of the items changes. The division between client and server in this system is unusual; the centralized state is uninterpreted by the server. Instead, the responsibility for semantics and processing falls on the clients, which collude to implement the application. After describing NSTP, we differentiate it from other systems in terms of the four design principles that have guided its development.”
“This paper presents the development of an open awareness protocol for the world wide web. The protocol is intended to convey the presence of users to other web users. To encourage uptake of the systems the protocol adheres to the principles that made the world wide web a success, simplicity and openness. An initial version of the protocol is presented along with servers realising the protocol. The paper concludes by showing how the awareness information can support both 2D and 3D presentations of the World Wide Web.”
“We consider the problem of providing communication protocol support for large-scale group collaboration systems for use in environments such as the Internet which are subject to packet loss, wide variations in end-to-end delays, and transient partitions. We identify a set of requirements that are critical for the design of such group collaboration systems. These include dynamic awareness notifications, reliable data delivery, and scalability to large numbers of users. We present a communication service, Corona, that attempts to meet these requirements. Corona supports two communication paradigms: the publish-subscribe paradigm and the peer group paradigm. We present the interfaces provided by Corona to applications which are based on these paradigms. We describe the semantics of each interface method call and show how they can help meet the above requirements.”
“We describe a case study in which experimental collaboration technologies was used for over two years in the real, ongoing work process of intellectual property management (IPM) at Xerox PARC. The technologies include LiveBoard-based meeting support tools, laptop notetaking tools, digital audio recording, and workstation tools to later access and replay the meeting activities. In cooperation with the IPM manager, both the work process and the tools were continuously evolved to improve the process. We supported and observed over 60 meetings, leading to a rich set of empirical observations of the meeting activities. We note some practical lessons for this research approach.”
“Computer systems developed for groups of people often have built-in social imperatives, either explicitly or implicitly brought to bear during technology design and use. Even when users are active, ongoing participants in design, conflicts can arise between the social assumptions inscribed in technical mechanisms and those in existing or proposed social practices, resulting in changes to both. This paper describes the joint evolution of tools and social practices in Pueblo, a school-centered learning community supported by a MOO (an Internet-accessible virtual world). Examples illustrate how one can design and use a social practice to simplify a technical implementation, and how one can make a choice in technical implementation to work towards a desirable social goal. Social and technical practices in a network community co-evolve as social values and policies become clearer and as growth in the community pushes it toward changes in the distribution of authority and power.”
“The type of collaboration for a group, whether working in parallel or collectively, is a style for a group influenced by many factors, among them the technology that the group works with. In an empirical study using the DOLPHIN system, we focused on the effect that using hypermedia structures in an electronic meeting room had on collaborative style. We found that groups who created documents using hypermedia were: 1) more likely to divide up their labor and work in parallel, and 2) to have a slower frequency of switching between the task phases of planning and developing ideas. We present a model to explain this effect of hypermedia on task division which suggests the involvement of mechanical and semantic components. We also discuss how DOLPHIN supports awareness of others people's activities for a parallel collaborative style.”
“The promise of workflow solutions for coordinating organizational processes is currently being obscured by strong criticism of the rigidity of their work representations. This rigidity arises in part from viewing work processes as unfolding along a single line of temporally chained activities. In reality, work evolves both horizontally, in the cooperation of causally unrelated, but information-sharing tasks, and vertically, in the coordination of causally-dependent activities. In this paper, we present our process modeling approach which (1) views documents and tasks as duals of each other, capturing horizontal cooperation; and (2) exploits constraints to express the soft dependencies among related activities and documents within the framework of generative rule-based grammars for processes, thus handling vertical coordination.”
“In order to understand some problems associated with workflow, we set out an analysis of workflow systems, identifying a number of basic issues in the underlying technology. This points to the conflation of temporal and dependency information as the source of a number of these problems. We describe Freeflow, a prototype which addresses these problems using a variety of technical innovations, including a rich constraint-based process modelling formalism, and the use of declarative dependency relationships. Its focus is on mediation between process and action, rather than the enactment of a process. We outline the system and its design principles, and illustrate the features of our approach with examples from ongoing work.”
“This paper presents the POLITeam solutions and experiences with the support of ministerial workflows by electronic circulation folders. An application scenario is presented that illustrates the user actions and cooperation that occur during the processing of a ministerial workflow. This scenario is afterwards examined to identify essential requirements for a computer based support of such processes. Based on that this paper describes the design of an electronic circulation folder and how this is augmented by a support for digital signatures, the integration of paper documents and a video conferencing system to satisfy the major user requirements.”
“A study of a spatially distributed product design team shows that most members are rarely at their individual desks. Mobility is essential for the use of shared resources and for communication. It facilitates informal interactions and awareness unavailable to colleagues at remote sites. Implications for technology design include portable and distributed computing resources, in particular moving beyond individual workstation-centric CSCW applications.”
“A difficult issue in the development of groupware applications is the specification of control and coordination mechanisms to handle the execution of common tasks on shared resources. The definition of these mechanisms depend on several factors, such as the current group of participants, their shared resources, tasks, and goals. These factors can change dynamically requiring coordination mechanisms to be updated at runtime. We propose that a collaborative program be divided into two main components, a computational program that models the shareable artifacts (e.g. pen, blackboard), and a coordination program that specifies the way these artifacts need to be shared. The main advantage of this approach is that coordination programs can be easily modified, often without any change to the computational program. We are developing a coordination language and its runtime interpreter that allows the specification of coordination mechanisms separately from computational programs.”
“This paper reports an ethnographic study of design work in the fashion industry. Contrary to many images of fashion design, in this setting, it is essentially tied to organizational and inter-organizational coordination, and the demands of manufacture and supply chain management. Relatively little design work involves artistic drawing, much requires retrieval from databases, data analysis, information gathering and matters which members themselves call 'technological'. Experiences collaborating with developers and the relevance of advanced 3D design tools and Virtual Reality for CSCW are considered on the basis of these findings and in the light of debates over ethnography in system development.”
“This paper argues that the CSCW focus on work needs to be expanded to include labor issues. Specifically it examines the role of labor issues such as wages, working conditions and division of labor in analyzing the consequences of information system design for white-collar jobs. It offers suggestions for including labor issues in the study of both current work practices and in the analysis of future design. A labor process perspective can offer the advantage of being able to design complex and interdependent systems while more clearly viewing current jobs and the consequences of planned systems for different interest groups.”
“To explore the potential of using audio by itself in a shared media system, we studied a workgroup using an audio-only media space. This media space, called Thunderwire, combined high-quality audio with open connections to create a shared space for its users. The two-month field study provided a richly nuanced understanding of this audio space's social use. The system afforded rich sociable interactions. Indeed, within the field study, audio by itself afforded a telepresent environment for its users. However while a usable media space and a useful social space, Thunderwire required its users to adapt to many audio-only conditions.”
“This paper describes a fundamental dual tradeoff that occurs in systems supporting awareness for distributed work groups, and presents several specific new techniques which illustrate good compromise points within this tradeoff space. This dual tradeoff is between privacy and awareness, and between awareness and disturbance. Simply stated, the more information about oneself that leaves your work area, the more potential for awareness of you exists for your colleagues. Unfortunately, this also represents the greatest potential for intrusion on your privacy. Similarly, the more information that is received about the activities of colleagues, the more potential awareness we have of them. However, at the same time, the more information we receive, the greater the chance that the information will become a disturbance to our normal work. This dual tradeoff seems to be a fundamental one. However, by carefully examining awareness problems in the light of this tradeoff it is possible to devise techniques which expose new points in the design space. These new points provide different types and quantities of information so that awareness can be achieved without invading the privacy of the sender, or creating a disturbance for the receiver. This paper presents four such techniques, each based on a careful selection of the information transmitted.”
“Workspace awareness is knowledge about others' interaction with a shared workspace. Groupware systems provide only limited information about other participants, often compromising workspace awareness. This paper describes a usability study of several widgets designed to help maintain awareness in groupware workspaces. These widgets included a miniature view, a radar view, a multi-user scrollbar, a glance function, and a "what you see is what I do" view. The study examined the widgets' information content, how easily people could interpret them, and whether they were distracting. Observations, questionnaires, and interviews indicate that the miniature and radar views are valuable for spatial manipulation tasks. The results also suggest new design requirements for awareness widgets: they should support both shared and individual work, provide familiar representations, and link perception and action.”
“CSCW toolkits are designed to ease development of CSCW applications. They provide common, reusable components for cooperative system design, allowing application programmers to concentrate on the details of their particular applications. The underlying assumption is that toolkit components can be designed and implemented independently of the details of particular applications. However, there is good evidence to suggest that this is not true. This paper presents a new technique which allows programmers to express application requirements, so that toolkit structures can be adapted to different circumstances. Prospero is a toolkit which uses this technique to meet different application needs flexibly.”
“We have developed a new framework for supporting concurrency control in collaborative applications. It supports multiple degrees of consistency and allows users to choose concurrency control policies based on the objects they are manipulating, the tasks they are performing, and the coupling and merge policies they are using. Concurrency control policies are embodied in hierarchical, constructor-based lock compatibility tables. Entries in these tables may be specified explicitly or derived automatically from coupling and merge policies. In this paper, we motivate and describe the framework, identify several useful concurrency control policies it can support, evaluate its flexibility, and give conclusions and directions for future work.”
“Concurrency control and group undo are important issues in the design of groupware, especially for interactive group editors. We present an improved version of an existing distributed algorithm for concurrency control that is based on operation transformations. Since the usability of the algorithm relies on its formal correctness, we present a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to be satisfied in order to ensure consistency in a replicated architecture. We identify desirable properties of operation transformations and show how our approach can be employed to implement group undo. The approach has been applied to build a prototypical group editor for text; some experiences gained are presented.”
“During the last year we have been designing and studying a computer based tool intended to strengthen social group awareness within a research laboratory. While awareness has been a subject of previous research it is still unclear how it should be conceptualized and how it can be provided for a CSCW system. In order to investigate this, and hence to attempt to create a system that would gain acceptance in the user community, we have been using a mixture of user-centered and participatory design methods. This paper presents the design process, the resulting system as well as users' comments on it. Based on all this, issues related to awareness are discussed and ideas for further studies are suggested.”
“This paper introduces COAST, an object-oriented toolkit for the development of synchronous groupware, which enhances the usability and simplifies the development of such applications. COAST offers basic and generic components for the design of synchronous groupware and is complemented by a methodology for groupware development. Basic features of the toolkit include transaction-controlled access to replicated shared objects, transparent replication management, and a fully optimistic concurrency control. Development support is provided by a session concept supporting the flexible coupling of shared objects' aspects between concurrent users and by a fully transparent updating concept for displays which is based on declarative programming.”
“FreeWalk is a desktop meeting environment to support informal communication. FreeWalk provides a 3-D community common where everybody can meet and can behave just as they do in real life. Each participant is represented as a pyramid of 3-D polygons on which his/her live video is mapped, and can move freely. Voice volume is proportional to the distance between sender and recipient so that many participants can talk without confusion. Various behaviors have been noted so far, such as approaching a talking couple from a distance to secretly listen to their conversation.”
“Much of the support for communication across distributed communities has focused on meetings and intentional contact. However, most interactions within co-located groups occur when people happen to run into each other. Such unintended interactions should also be supported among distributed communities. We conducted a study of the communication patterns of a large, distributed organization and found that people tend to disseminate information using formal techniques, even though people usually receive information informally. We then designed a system called Piazza that is intended to support the range of communication styles evident in large communities, paying particular attention to addressing the problems revealed in our study. Piazza allows people to be aware of others who are doing similar tasks when they are using their computers, thereby enabling unintended interactions. It also supports intentional contacts and planned meetings. We discuss issues for analysis in an upcoming use study.”
“Teams whose members are in close physical proximity often rely on team rooms to serve both as meeting places and repositories of the documents and artifacts that support their projects. TeamRooms is a groupware system that fills the role of a team room for groups whose members can work both co-located and at a distance. Facilities in TeamRooms allow team members to collaborate either in real-time or asynchronously, and to customize their shared electronic space with tools to suit their needs. Unlike many groupware systems, all TeamRooms documents and artifacts are fully persistent.”
“This case study explores the nature of work for one group of systems administrators. Their virtual work domain offered little support for collaboration and mechanisms in the physical domain were often used instead. However, the way that group members were able to make sense of their complex virtual work environment suggests a new interpretation of spatial metaphors for the design of collaborative systems. This is one based on 'place' or 'locale', and 'centres', taking into account the observation that people work in multiple social worlds simultaneously, that these social worlds provide a structuring over the work domain, and that the individual draws from this structure elements relevant to their tasks.”
“Our experience with Internet-based scientific collaboratories indicates that they need to be user-extensible, allow users to add tools and objects dynamically to shared workspaces, permit users to move work dynamically between private and shared workspaces, and be easily accessible over a network. We present the software architecture of an environment, called CBE, for building collaboratories to meet such needs. CBE provides user-extensibility by allowing a collaboratory to be constructed as a coordinated collection of group-aware applets. To support dynamic reconfiguration of shared workspaces and to allow access over the Internet, CBE uses the metaphor of rooms as the high-level grouping mechanism for applets and users. Rooms may contain applets, users, and arbitrary data objects. Rooms can be used for both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration because their state persists across synchronous sessions. Room participants may have different roles in a room (such as administrator, member and observer), with appropriate access rights. A prototype of the model has been implemented in Java and can be run from a Java-enabled Web browser.”
“Despite the widespread introduction of information technology into primary health care within the United Kingdom, medical practitioners continue to use the more traditional paper medical record often alongside the computerised system. The resilience of the paper document is not simply a consequence of an impoverished design, but rather a product of the socially organised practices and reasoning which surround the use of the record within day to day consultative work. The practices that underpin the use of the medical records may have a range of important implications, not only for the general design of systems to support collaborative work, but also for our conceptions of 'writers', 'readers', 'objects' and 'records' utilised in those designs.”
“Protocols of care are representations of practice that specify how patients should be treated given specified conditions. We have been exploring ways that protocols of care can be encoded in computers so that they can actively structure work people do in clinics to accord with standards of care. We describe one such implementation called the Care Manager. Because a protocol's power to suggest action lies in people's alignment to it, and because organizational change can make such standards obsolete overnight, means for keeping protocols in sync with work practice are a necessary accompaniment to any implementation of protocol-based care.”
“In Finnish paper mills the stream of paper being produced can, and does break. A major concern is when these breaks are recurrent or prolonged. Downtime is expensive. The causes and remedies for problem breaks in a sophisticated and highly automated process can be hard to find. The paper reports on research from a CSCW perspective into the work activities of production crews, the social and information infrastructures that support them. It makes design recommendations for enhanced support for Organisational Memory and ways it might be differentially indexed to suit production crews.”
“Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) employ virtual reality technology to support cooperative work. Building on ethnographic and interaction analyses of CVEs in use, we argue that many and varied activities are required to set up, maintain and troubleshoot CVEs. These activities cross-over between virtual worlds and the real, physical environments which meeting participants inhabit. Thus, an understanding of CVEs must attend to the relations between cooperation within a CVE and for it to be established as an arena for intelligible social action. These findings suggest a social scientifically informed respecification of what it is to be 'immersed' in a CVE.”
“We compared face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated (CMC) conversations among small groups of scientists carrying out data collection campaigns. We found multiple threads of conversation in both settings, but this was much more extensive in the CMC cases. The two kinds of conversation were very similar in content and nature of participation, but differed in their temporal flow. The software that supported the CMC conversations allowed interactions that were quite similar in character to the FTF situations. The low incidence of thread confusions and the potential value of overhearing useful conversations does not seem to warrant providing technology in the CMC situation to split apart conversational threads.”
“Existing Cooperative Virtual Environments present the same shared world to each of the cooperating users. This is analogous to the use of strict-WYSIWIS in early 2D interfaces. Research in the area of shared 2D interfaces has shown a strong trend to support individual tailoring of the shared views, and move away from the strict-WYSIWIS abstraction. This paper argues that the development of Cooperative Virtual Environments can gain from the experience of research into in shared 2D interface systems, and presents a model to manage the use of subjective views in Cooperative Virtual Environments.”
“We investigated how cooperation with a computer agent was affected by the agent's pictorial realism, human-likeness, and likability. Participants played a social dilemma game with a talking computer agent that resembled a person, a dog, or a cartoon dog, or with a confederate interacting through a video link. Participants cooperated highly with the person computer agent and with the confederate. They loved the dog and dog cartoon agents, but (excepting dog owners), they cooperated significantly less with the dog agents. Behavioral and questionnaire results suggest likability is less important than respect in prompting cooperation with a computer agent.”
“This empirical study examines factors influencing the success of a commercial groupware system in creating group archives and supporting asynchronous communication. The study investigates the use of Lotus Notes in a workplace setting. We interviewed 21 Notes users and identified three factors that they thought contributed to the successful use of Notes databases for archiving and communication. We then tested the effect of these factors on 15,571 documents in 20 different databases. Contrary to our users' beliefs, we found the presence of an active database moderator actually inhibited discussions, and reduced browsing. Further paradoxical results were that conversations and the creation of group archives were more successful in databases with large numbers of diverse participants. Conversations and archiving were less successful in smaller, more homogeneous, project teams. Database size was also important: a large database containing huge amounts of information was more likely to be used for further conversations and archiving, than a small one. This result again ran counter to users' beliefs that small databases are superior. We discuss possible reasons for these findings in terms of critical mass and media competition and conclude with implications for design.”
“Current research on CSCW for remote groups focuses on one technology at a time: shared editing on the desktop, video conferencing, glancing at others' offices, email, etc. When a real group sets out to work remotely, however, they need to consider all aspects of work, synchronous, asynchronous, and the transitions to and from. This paper explores the planning, implementation, and use of a suite of groupware tools over the course of a year in a real group with remote members. We found that groupware affected people's commitments and the nature of the work distribution.”
“Sociotechnical systems theory suggests several themes about implementation, including continuous mutual adaptation of tool and context, task emphasis, the priority of process, and changes in evaluative criteria over time. The effectiveness of these ideas is illustrated in the experience of the World Bank in its implementation of a group decision support system, GroupSystems.”
“In domains like air traffic management, aircraft carrier operations, and space mission control, practitioners coordinate their activities through voice loops that allow communication among groups of people who are spatially separate. Voice loops have evolved into essential coordination support tools for experienced practitioners in space shuttle mission control, as well as other domains. We describe how voice loops support the coordination of activities and cognitive processes in event-driven domains like space shuttle mission control. We discuss how the loops help flight controllers synchronize their activities and integrate information, and how they facilitate directed communication and support the negotiation of interruptions. In addition, we suggest factors like attentional cues, implicit protocols, and the structure and features of the loops, which might govern the success of voice loops in the mission control domain. Our results should provide insight into the important functions that should be considered in the development of systems intended to support cooperative work.”
“We report an empirical study of people using mobile collaborative systems to support maintenance tasks on a bicycle. Results show that field workers make repairs more quickly and accurately when they have a remote expert helping them. Some pairs were connected by a shared video system, where the video camera focused on the active workspace and they communicated with full duplex audio. For other pairs, either the video was eliminated or the audio was reduced to half duplex (but not both). Pairs' success at collaboration did not vary with the communication technology. However, the manner in which they coordinated advice-giving did vary with the communication technology. In particular, help was more proactive and coordination was less explicit when the pairs had video connections. The results show the value of collaboration, but raise questions about the interaction of communication media and conversational coordination on task performance.”
“Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of "space" and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between "space" and "place". While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of "place" which frames interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how "place", rather than "space", can support CSCW design.”
“We review current spatial approaches to CSCW (mediaspaces, spatial video conferencing, collaborative virtual environments and telepresence) and classify them along the proposed dimensions of transportation, artificiality and spatiality. This classification leads us to identify new shared space applications; so called mixed realities. We present an example of a mixed reality called the Internet Foyer, an application which provides a unified entry point into an organisation's physical and electronic environments and which supports awareness and chance encounters between the occupants of physical and synthetic space.”
“This paper presents a model of awareness for shared cooperative applications. The model developed in this paper takes as its starting point a previous spatial model of interaction. A more general model is suggested that allows the action of users to be represented and made available to other users of the application. The developed model exploits the partitioning of space inherent within the spatial model to allow its application to non-spatial applications. The general applicability of the model is demonstrated by considering a range of different interpretations across a number of cooperative applications.”
“This research examines a collaborative solution to a common problem, that of providing help to distributed users. The Answer Garden 2 system provides a second-generation architecture for organizational and community memory applications. After describing the need for Answer Garden 2's functionality, we describe the architecture of the system and two underlying systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and Collaborative Refinery. We also present detailed descriptions of the collaborative help and collaborative refining facilities in the Answer Garden 2 system.”
Page maintainer: The Editorial Team How to cite/reference this page
URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/conferences/proceedings_of_the_1996_acm_conference_on_computer_supported_cooperative_work.html
You say:
Mar 19th, 2010
