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 propose an interaction model for video mediated communication systems that support informal communication among distributed groups. We focused on two issues raised in previous research, the problem of intrusiveness that occurs when a caller glances at a recipient prior to conversation, and the failure of facilitating unintended interactions with unexpected partners. The proposed model addresses these problems by introducing "interactional distance" among users. We developed our prototype system that embodied this model, and examined these problems by conducting a user experiment. We confirmed that the problem of intrusiveness was reduced, and unintended interactions were partially supported.”
“This paper describes an empirical study that compared three alternatives for voice communication in conjunction with Web page collaboration for customer service. Two of the technologies used a single phone line for both voice and data transmission. These technologies were internet telephony and Simultaneous Voice and Data (SVD), a protocol which allows the voice to be routed over the public telephone network, rather than the internet. The study found that SVD was superior to internet telephony in terms of a number of behavioral and subjective measures of conversational interaction. The study also found that task time using internet telephony was 45% greater than with SVD, making the former a costly alternative in terms of human time.”
“Media space applications that promote informal awareness in an organization confront an inevitable paradox: the shared video connections between offices and rooms that promote informal awareness also can rob individuals of privacy. An important open problem in this area is how to foster awareness of colleagues while minimizing the accompanying loss of privacy. One proposal put forward is to filter the communicated video streams rather than broadcasting clear video. Such a scheme may facilitate awareness while helping to alleviate some aspects of the privacy loss. In this article, we describe several image filtering techniques that provide awareness in informal group communication applications while blurring the details of an individual's activities, thus potentially preserving more privacy. We describe studies to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the degrees of awareness and accuracy that these filtering techniques provide.”
“The growth in interest in virtual environments in CSCW has focused on co-operation within these environments. Little consideration has been given to users management of these environments and their movement between them. In this paper we present a session management architecture that supports the management of virtual environments. The developed architecture is built upon the HTTP protocol and is sufficiently general to allow it to support a range of CSCW application. We present the architecture and its use to support both virtual environments and more generic cooperative applications.”
“Essential prerequisites to asynchronous work with shared artifacts include things such as an ability to effectively communicate information, an ability to understand the actions of collaborators, and an ability to integrate work from others. Systems designed to support ubiquitous collaboration -- collaboration that can scale to communities the size of the Internet -- face a number of important challenges in providing these prerequisites. For example, when the set of potential collaborators becomes large, and collaborative media becomes richer, simple interoperability of application programs quickly becomes a difficult issue. Further, various market pressures, along with the rapid growth of a diverse Internet, will, for the most part, make these problems worse rather than better.”
“Existing GUI builder technology supports building user interfaces for interactive applications via direct manipulation. However, it is notoriously difficult to build the underlying data sharing and application logic for multi-user synchronous collaborative applications. This paper describes a collection of very high-level software components, built using the JavaBeans component standard, that enables domain experts and application designers to rapidly build entire collaborative applications via visual programming -- drag-and-drop, customization and wiring. Our component suite supports conference setup, awareness, data sharing, media streaming, access synchronization, and temporally coordinated media and event streams. We illustrate that the task of building non-trivial multi-user applications using this approach is significantly simplified.”
“Our purpose in designing the HyperMirror system is to produce a new type of video-image that provides an attractive communication environment with high understandability, rather than imitating face-to-face communication. In the HyperMirror environment, all participants are made to feel they are sharing the same virtual space. In this system, communication is made using images that meet the condition WISIWYS, all the participants become equal and everything on the screen becomes tangible, including objects located in the distance out of reach. It was found that the participants sharing the same screen behaved as if they had been in the same room.”
“Meme Tags are part of a body of research on GroupWear: a wearable technology that supports people in the formative stages of cooperative work. Conference participants wear Meme Tags that allow them to electronically share memes -- succinct ideas or opinions -- with each other. Alongside of the person-to-person transactions, a server system collects information about the memetic exchanges and reflects it back to the conference-goers in Community Mirrors -- large, public video displays that present real-time visualizations of the unfolding community dynamics. This paper presents results from a proof-of-concept trial of the Meme Tag technology undertaken at a MIT Media Laboratory conference.”
“Current systems for real-time distributed CSCW are largely rooted in traditional GUI-based groupware and voice/video conferencing methodologies. In these approaches, interactions are limited to visual and auditory media, and shared environments are confined to the digital world. This paper presents a new approach to enhance remote collaboration and communication, based on the idea of Tangible Interfaces, which places a greater emphasis on touch and physicality. The approach is grounded in a concept called Synchronized Distributed Physical Objects, which employs telemanipulation technology to create the illusion that distant users are interacting with shared physical objects. We describe two applications of this approach: PSyBench, a physical shared workspace, and inTouch, a device for haptic interpersonal communication.”
“Coordination policies vary from collaboration to collaboration and are even subject to evolution in different phases of the same collaboration. It is vital for collaborative systems to be flexible enough to accommodate changes to the coordination policies during development time and their adaptation by end users. Motivated by previous work of separating coordination and computation, we propose COCA as a generic framework for developing collaborative systems and modeling the coordination policies. We explicitly divide participants into different roles, and specify the coordination policies by roles in a logic-based specification language. Policies are interpreted at runtime at each collaboration site by a COCA virtual machine. It is easy to change the coordination policies both during development and at runtime.”
“The Artefact framework is a tool for building collaborative applications that deliver HTML representations of an object-oriented application space to standard browsers. We present some aspects of Artefact's implementation, including HTTP enhancements to support synchronous collaboration, the decoupling of input and output in the interaction protocol, a lightweight general-purpose Java applet, and the user agents that bridge the gap between a browser and an application. We describe some of the characteristics that make it easy to create multi-user applications with Artefact, and illustrate this with a simple example application. Finally, we compare Artefact to some existing distributed application platforms.”
“This paper describes the concept of activity awareness, which enables workspace awareness without employing shared workspaces, and our framework for supporting activity awareness. Activity awareness extends the concept of asynchronous workspace awareness to provide asynchronous progress notifications and collective perspectives on related activities. Our framework adopts the temporally threaded workspace model, which tracks an activity in each individual's workspace by storing a sequence of snapshots of their workspace, and uses workspace configuration mechanisms to provide awareness functions. We then present Interlocus, an implementation of the framework in the WWW environment.”
“We describe the support for roles in a shared space application and programming environment called Kansas. As in reality, the underlying physics of Kansas has no notion of role. However, roles are supported by two features of the system: the spatial character of Kansas (which enables different views for different users) and a capability system that filters user inputs. Spatial positions and capabilities can be easily changed, so the support for roles is dynamic, lightweight, and flexible. Our system is simple, and intentionally limited in scope.”
“Users of synchronous groupware systems act both as individuals and as members of a group, and designers must try to support both roles. However, the requirements of individuals and groups often conflict, forcing designers to support one at the expense of the other. The tradeoff is particularly evident in the design of interaction techniques for shared workspaces. Individuals demand powerful and flexible means for interacting with the workspace and its artifacts, while groups require information about each other to maintain awareness. Although these conflicting requirements present real problems to designers, the tension can be reduced in some cases. We consider the tradeoff in three areas of groupware design: workspace navigation, artifact manipulation, and view representation. We show techniques such as multiple viewports, process feedthrough, action indicators, and view translations that support the needs of both individuals and groups.”
“This paper explores and evaluates the support for object-focused collaboration provided by a desktop Collaborative Virtual Environment. The system was used to support an experimental 'design' task. Video recordings of the participants' activities facilitated an observational analysis of interaction in, and through, the virtual world. Observations include: problems due to fragmented views of embodiments in relation to shared objects; participants compensating with spoken accounts of their actions; and difficulties in understanding others' perspectives. Design implications include: more explicit representations of actions than are provided by pseudo-humanoid embodiments; and navigation techniques that are sensitive to the actions of others.”
“Issues of notification and awareness have become increasingly important in CSCW. Notification servers provide a notable mechanism to maintain shared state information of any synchronous or asynchronous groupware system. A taxonomy of the design space for notification servers is presented, based on theoretical results from status-event analysis. This generates a framework and vocabulary to compare and discuss different notification mechanisms to improve design. The paper shows that notification servers are often ideally placed to support impedance matching to give an appropriate pace of feedthrough to the user by allowing them to see changes to shared objects in a timely manner.”
“The development of shared environments and displays has also seen the emergence of facilities to allow some form of subjective tailoring of shared interfaces. This paper considers the need to dynamically re-couple tailored interfaces as users become increasingly aware of each other. We present a general model to support awareness based re-coupling of shared interfaces and show its implementation in cooperative virtual environments and shared user interfaces.”
“Meta access-control, also called access administration, ensures that users do not make unauthorized access definitions. Such control in a collaborative system must support fine-grained protection, a flexible scheme for assigning access administrators, joint ownership of shared objects, multiple ownership semantics of varying complexity, delegation of access rights, and both shallow and deep revocation. It should also be easy to implement in a variety of applications, easy to use by users of varying sophistication with different protection needs, and offer a small set of features that can be incrementally learned. We have designed a new model to meet these requirements and implemented and used it in a generic, extensible collaborative system. We have also developed techniques for simulating a large variety of existing policies for meta access-control. In particular, we have developed an implementation-independent technique of indirect roles to support flexible delegation and revocation. In this paper, we identify requirements of meta access control, describe our model together with the techniques for using it, compare it with related work, give our experience with it, and evaluate how well it meets the requirements.”
“Usenet may be regarded as the world's largest conversational application, with over 17,000 newsgroups and 3 million users. Despite its ubiquity and popularity, however, we know little about the nature of the interactions it supports. This empirical paper investigates mass interaction in Usenet. We analyse over 2.15 million messages from 659,450 posters, collected from 500 newsgroups over 6 months. We first characterise mass interaction, presenting basic data about demographics, conversational strategies and interactivity. Using predictions from the common ground model of interaction, we next conduct causal modelling to determine relations between demographics, conversational strategies and interactivity. We find evidence for moderate conversational threading, but large participation inequalities in Usenet, with a small minority of participants posting a large proportion of messages. Contrary to the common ground model and "Netiquette" guidelines, we also find that "cross-posting" to external newsgroups is highly frequent. Our predictions about the effects of demographics on conversational strategy were largely confirmed, but we found disconfirming evidence about the relations between conversational strategy and interactivity. Contrary to our expectations, both cross-posting and short messages promote interactivity. We conclude that in order to explain mass interaction, the common ground model must be modified to incorporate notions of weak ties and communication overload.”
“This paper reports on our efforts to improve interfaces for asynchronous communication in which a group is communicating to solve a problem. We report results from an observational study and an experiment and use them as a basis for drawing design requirements: task-tailorable representations, emergent representations, emergent sharing, public/private elements in a layout, incremental formalization, and asynchronous awareness. We describe an approach and prototype that embodies some of the key requirements.”
“The goal of this paper is to identify the communication tactics that allow management teams to successfully coordinate without becoming overloaded, and to see whether successful coordination and freedom from overload independently influence team performance. We found that how much teams communicated, what they communicated about, and the technologies they used to communicate predicted coordination and overload. Team coordination but not overload predicted team success.”
“The Pebbles project is creating applications to connect multiple Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to a main computer such as a PC. We are using 3Com PalmPilots because they are starting to be ubiquitous. We created the "Remote Commander" application to allow users to take turns sending input from their PalmPilots to the PC as if they were using the PC's mouse and keyboard. "PebblesDraw" is a shared whiteboard application we built that allows all of the users to send input simultaneously while sharing the same PC display. We are investigating the use of these applications in various contexts, such as co-located meetings.”
“The role of collaborative information technology in organisational changes continues to be a source of controversy in the CSCW literature. We report organisational changes in a Finnish computer consultancy accompanying the introduction and use of Lotus Notes over a period of three years. The case shows that collaborative information technologies, such as Lotus Notes, are capable of supporting a variety forms of organisation. The uptake and use of Notes appeared to be more strongly influenced by aspects of the organisational context, internal social structure and the users' capabilities -- in this case economic recession, changing foci of control and the role changes in the company -- than by any intrinsic logic of the technology.”
“Our goal is to provide tools to support working meetings on an electronic whiteboard, called Tivoli. This paper describes how we have integrated structured "domain objects" into the whiteboard environment. Domain objects represent the subject matter of meetings and can be exchanged between Tivoli and group databases. Domain objects can be tailored to produce meeting tools that are finely tuned to meeting practices. We describe the facility for tailoring and managing domain objects and the user interface techniques for blending these into the whiteboard environment. We show examples of both specific and generic meeting tools crafted from domain objects, and we describe a long-term case study in which these tools support an ongoing work process.”
“This paper explores an issue that has received little attention within CSCW -- the requirements to support mobility within collaboration activities. By examining three quite different settings each with differing technological support, we reveal ways in which mobility can feature in collaborative work. A focus on such activities may, on the one hand, suggest enhancements to the current support offered for collaborative work and, on the other, suggest a reconsideration of the requirements for mobile and other related technologies.”
“Everyday, people in organizations must solve their problems to get their work accomplished. To do so, they often must find others with knowledge and information. Systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly interesting to organizations and scientific communities. But, as we begin to design and construct such systems, it is important to determine what we are attempting to augment. Accordingly, we conducted a five month field study of a medium-sized software firm. We found the participants use complex, iterative behaviors to minimize the number of possible expertise sources, while at the same time, provide a high possibility of garnering the necessary expertise. We briefly consider the design implications of the mechanisms identification, selection, and escalation behaviors found during our field study.”
“CSCW systems and research aim to sustain productive relationships over barriers of time and space. For the most part, however, the CSCW literature has focused on short-term relationships or collaborative episodes. Here, we examine 37 lengthy email relationships between students in grades 7 to 12 and volunteer scientists who advised them on lengthy science projects. We consider the unique dynamics of these relationships, illustrate their technical and social demands, and discuss the potential for CSCW systems to help sustain long-term help relationships by better accommodating their needs.”
“Knowledge communities of all kinds have social and material practices for deciding what is known and who is to be trusted. In this paper, we address a specific kind of knowledge work, environmental planning, and a particular form of collaboration, the sharing of measurement data sets. We are interested in how trust is created; how trustability is assessed in the arm's-length collaboration of sharing data sets; and how changes in technology interact with those practices of trust. We look at several elements of scientific practice that facilitate this sharing -- communities of practice, boundary objects, and assemblages -- and discuss the implications for CSCW, digital libraries, and other information-sharing applications.”
“Collaborative filtering systems help address information overload by using the opinions of users in a community to make personal recommendations for documents to each user. Many collaborative filtering systems have few user opinions relative to the large number of documents available. This sparsity problem can reduce the utility of the filtering system by reducing the number of documents for which the system can make recommendations and adversely affecting the quality of recommendations. This paper defines and implements a model for integrating content-based ratings into a collaborative filtering system. The filterbot model allows collaborative filtering systems to address sparsity by tapping the strength of content filtering techniques. We identify and evaluate metrics for assessing the effectiveness of filterbots specifically, and filtering system enhancements in general. Finally, we experimentally validate the filterbot approach by showing that even simple filterbots such as spell checking can increase the utility for users of sparsely populated collaborative filtering systems.”
“Links between web sites can be seen as evidence of a type of emergent collaboration among web site authors. We report here on an empirical investigation into emergent collaboration. We developed a webcrawling algorithm and tested its performance on topics volunteered by 30 subjects. Our findings include: * Some topics exhibit emergent collaboration, some do not. The presence of commercial sites reduces collaboration. * When sites are linked with other sites, they tend to group into one large, tightly connected component. * Connectivity can serve as the basis for collaborative filtering. Human experts rate connected sites as significantly more relevant and of higher quality.”
“Environmental factors affecting shared spaces are typically designed to appeal to the broadest audiences they are expected to serve, ignoring the preferences of the people actually inhabiting the environment at any given time. Examples of such factors include the lighting, temperature, decor or music in the common areas of an office building. We have designed and deployed MusicFX, a group preference arbitration system that allows the members of a fitness center to influence, but not directly control, the selection of music in a fitness center. We present a number of empirical results from our work with this intelligent environment: the results of a poll of fitness center members, a quantitative evaluation of the performance of a group preference arbitrator in a shared environment, and some interesting anecdotes about members' experiences with the system.”
“In this paper, we present experiences from long-term groupware development, introduction, and use in an organization. We report lessons learned concerning how a complex design process operates and how its components interact. Our experiences suggest that the processes of requirement analysis, system development, and user support need to facilitate the merging of individual work patterns into congruent system usage. We confirm the changing nature of groupware use by reporting empirical results describing different learning phases.”
“Virtual Reality has attracted much attention in CSCW as a means for providing 'Collaborative Virtual Environments'. In this paper an alternative use is made of VR for CSCW. Our work focuses not upon VR as an actual interface to CSCW systems but as a means for providing a rich environment in which to, firstly, represent the results of ethnographic study and, secondly, to explore requirements for a collaborative system by envisioning new work arrangements. We report on our use of VR in this way and what it offers for supporting the transition between ethnographic fieldwork and system design. We also report on the transition from a 3D envisionment to designing a 2D system intended for real world use.”
“The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul. Memory appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been limited to a few uses. In this paper we examine what memory in an organization really is. Based on an ethnographic study of a telephone hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level analysis of a hotline call, the work activity surrounding the call, and the memory used in the work activity. We do this analysis from the viewpoint of distributed cognition theory, finding it fruitful for an understanding of an organization's memory.”
“Design and development work have become increasingly interesting to CSCW researchers. This paper introduces a new perspective for examining that work: recomposition. Recomposition focuses on the activities required to coordinate the assembly of an artifact. Using examples drawn from a study of three software development organizations I show how recomposition is a form of articulation work. I describe how that articulation work influences the product produced, and how the product itself influences the coordination required. I discuss the implications of a recomposition view for CSCW research.”
“Is the current Internet leading people to have strong connections to others or is it working against this? New empirical results suggest that using the Internet leads to less social involvement, more loneliness, less communication within the family, and more depression. The panel will assess whether these results are believable, and if so whether new services on the Internet can be designed to support strong social ties. The second goal of the panel is to outline these good designs.”
“Everyone is talking about Knowledge Management (KM). At least, everyone in the commercial world who used to buy or sell groupware. It's captured the attention of vendors, customers, analysts and reporters. Is it real or a fad, the next step in evolution from email, through groupware, to what people REALLY need, or the next open area for research on large organizations and their real needs? The panel moderator will assemble a group of experts from the companies leading the KM movement and representatives of academic research organizations with dissenting views. Join us as we take a look at the KM frenzy, with an eye towards identifying open questions that can be addressed by CSCW researchers.”
“The purpose of this special session will be to illuminate some of the possible ways in which we, as observers and researchers, can come to understand collaboration and how it is achieved within the context of joint activity. Historically, collaboration has been studied in a variety of ways, both quantitative and qualitative, drawing on the research traditions of both the psychological and the social (i.e., Anthropology, Sociology, Linguistics, Communications) sciences. Our goal here is to highlight some of these methodological differences while at the same time demonstrating how different approaches can each contribute to a richer and more fully elaborated view of the collaborative process. In preparation for this session six researchers with extensive experience in studying collaboration were asked to analyze a common piece of data -- a pre-selected segment of videotaped interaction. Each will summarize their findings followed by a discussion intended to highlight the complementarities and incommensurabilities among the six analyses.”
“Future work, cooperation, and organizations will be characterized by greater dynamics, flexibility and mobility. Realizing this goal has profound implications for information and communication technology as well as architecture because virtual and physical spaces have to be designed in an integrated fashion to provide equally flexible cooperative work environments. We will outline a challenging generation of new problems and issues which are likely to shape future CSCW and building research.”
“Scoping out constraints and possibilities is an important task for any designer or consultant. This workshop focuses on improving collaborative design and consulting interventions by better charting technological and organizational constraints. In participatory design and computer supported collaborative work, practitioners and participants must attend to numerous constraints if they are to discover productive possibilities. For example, software is designed on the terrain of hardware capabilities, building configuration and use arise amidst zoning restrictions, and organizations identify and tap sources of legitimacy. Constraints include tools, knowledge, organizational support, social and cultural conventions, time, and others. Making conflicts explicit between different sets of design constraints is productive as it encourages new and creative ways to solve design problems. How do consultants make these conflicts explicit? We will consider experiences in which design practice was improved by explicitly examining constraints. Workshop participants will develop a draft guide including various methods for mapping out constraints to design processes. See our web page for the expected content of position papers.”
“Many technologies such as the PC, Internet access, new digital media and advanced telephony are now found in the home and are changing (or seeking to change) the ways in which people are entertained, informed and interpersonally connected in domestic environments. The goal of the workshop is to understand and experience the practice of professional work and the use of advanced communication technology in domestic environments. This will be accomplished through collaborative exploration into the territory of empirical research in CSCW and its increasingly important focus on technological change. Of special interest for the workshop will be to identify where -- and where not -- already known methods and practices could be applied in domestic environments.”
“The workshop investigates the application of handheld and wearable computers to support collaborative work. Participation is sought both from the collaborative work research community and handheld computing research areas such as ubiquitous computing, wearable computing, personal digital assistants, and mobile computing. Specific objectives are to analyse handheld CSCW systems and applications, to review handheld technologies with respect to their application in CSCW, and to inform handheld computing development from analysis of collaborative work. More general goals are to promote an awareness of handheld computing in the CSCW community, to stimulate a shift from single-user to multi-user application of handhelds and wearables, and to foster a community for handheld CSCW research.”
“We will discuss current conceptions of collaborative and cooperative information seeking activities, and identify potential areas for future research on the design and use of digital information spaces. We wish to explore different kinds of collaboration, including asynchronous recommendation systems and synchronous collaborative search and browsing activities by non-collocated participants. Our concern is that in the absence of such a debate, systems will be designed embodying assumptions about information seeking as a solitary activity. This workshop will be of interest to researchers concerned with the design of user interfaces and systems for supporting information exploration and information seeking activities. This includes user-centered aspects of design of systems for public use (e.g. public digital libraries, the WWW) and systems for use by more focused work groups.”
“While the popularity of networked virtual communities has been growing, their use has remained primarily social. Given the necessity of communication and collaboration among distributed workers, it seems natural to consider how these spaces might be used to support work and the surrounding social interactions. This workshop will focus on understanding how organizations are currently using virtual communities, and how they could be enhanced to better support the needs of collaborative workers. By "virtual communities" we are thinking primarily of MUDs, MOOs, and other collaboration software involving text, graphics, and/or other media. We will explore how to take advantage of the inherently engaging attributes of virtual communities to accomplish work, preserve organizational memory, promote corporate culture, and encourage professional networking. We will identify issues that are common to groups exploring work-based virtual communities and share the design approaches that are being tried to address them.”
“Approaches in User-Centered Design (UCD) vary from Participatory Design to model-based engineering. No matter what the approach, UCD is not a simple, clear-cut way to develop successful systems. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the problems encountered in practice and possible solutions, focusing on case studies in real systems development projects. Problems in this area include communication problems or lack of communication between system developers and users, between management and users, and between individuals in a team; and conflicting goals between the different groups in the process. Does UCD require certain attitudes in the organization and in individuals in order to bring success? Do UCD and requirements engineering conflict? What is the role of management and authority in a project in order to be able to make the decisions that are required for a project to succeed? Is UCD appropriate for every type of work activity?”
“Developments in electronic networks, such as the Internet, provide the potential to alter scholarly communication patterns and work organisation radically. The focus of this study is the mutual interaction between electronic networks and disciplinary culture and the consequences of cultural differences for the uptake and use of such networks. Knowledge domains within academia are not homogenous, each discipline has a distinctive social and epistemological structure which leads to variations in the communication system which underpins academic research. These domains can be categorised into four general types: Pure science; applied science; arts and humanities; and social science. A number of authors have devised typologies that outline the social and epistemological processes which span the disciplines within each group. The relationship between these differential cultures and electronic networks will be explored using in-depth interviews with networks of researchers from several divergent specialisms. Analysis of pilot interviews has revealed domain differences in the purpose, frequency, and perception of electronic network use.”
“Few studies of technology mediated group communication exist. This paper describes a laboratory-based information exchange task comparing the communication and task performance of 36 three-person groups in face-to-face, audio-only, and video-mediated communication (VMC). Analyses revealed no statistically significant differences in dialogue length or performance between the three conditions. However, VMC conversations tended to have most words and speaking turns and those in face-to-face communication the least. This trend was explored using Conversational Games Analysis (Kowtko, Isard & Doherty-Sneddon, 1991), an exhaustive form of coding of the functional use of utterances. The content of 12 face-to-face and 12 video-mediated dialogues was coded. This showed that significantly more interactive work tended to be required in VMC to complete the task. It is proposed that impoverished visual feedback cues, novelty and remoteness in VMC make it more difficult for the participants to reach mutual understanding, and hence more difficult to complete the task.”
“Brief critiques of organisational memory as "thing" are pre-sented, and an alternative conceptualisation as artefact mediated process is offered. Within this frame, the paper gives an account of usage of a simple electronic artefact within a process industry: specifically an Electronic Diary on the factory floor of a large modern papermill. Analysis of 3,500 entries made in a year illustrates the multifaceted use of the Diary. These show that Diary entries constitute dialogues within and between work-shifts, and partially with other organisational levels. The dialogues share some properties -- "talking out loud" and "overhearing" -- with work co-ordination in face-to-face situations.”
“Real-time group editors allow a group of users to view and edit the same document at the same time from geographically dispersed sites connected by communication networks. Consistency maintenance is one of the most significant challenges in the design and implementation of this type of system. Research on real-time group editors in the past decade has invented a non-traditional technique for consistency maintenance, called operational transformation. This paper presents an integrative review of the evolution of operational transformation techniques, with the goals of identifying the major issues, algorithms, achievements, and remaining challenges. In addition, this paper contributes a new optimized generic operational transformation control algorithm.”
“The Distributed Operation Transform (dOPT), proposed by Ellis and Gibbs, is used to define concurrently updatable shared objects. Ellis and Gibbs give the operation transforms that define a simple shared text editor supporting single character insertions and deletions on a linear buffer. We report here on the construction of operation transforms for a more sophisticated groupware application: a shared spreadsheet. We identify a set of abstract operations that characterize the operations on a spreadsheet. Using Cormack's Calculus for Concurrent Update, which extends and corrects dOPT, we give the transforms on these operations necessary to define a shared spreadsheet. We use the transforms to build a shared version of sc, the Unix spreadsheet due to Gosling.”
“Interactive (or Synchronous) groupware is increasingly being deployed in widely distributed environments. Users of such applications are accustomed to direct manipulation interfaces that require fast response time. The state that enables interaction among distributed users can be replicated to provide acceptable response time in the presence of high communication latencies. We describe and evaluate design choices for protocols that maintain consistency of such state. In particular, we develop workloads which model user actions, identify the metrics important from a user's viewpoint, and do detailed simulations of a number of protocols to evaluate how effective they are in meeting user requirements.”
“CSCW seems to have a persistent problem of understanding the ontology of "cooperative work". This paper argues that this problem is a direct result of not looking at the dynamic aspects of work. Based on Activity Theory the paper gives a conceptual frame for understanding the dynamics of collaborative work activities, and argues that the design of computer support should view cooperative breakdowns not as a problem but as an important resource in design. These arguments are based on empirical studies of healthcare work and the design of a computer support for planning and scheduling operations and other activities within a hospital.”
“In this paper, we describe our experiences in designing two applications for synchronous web browser sharing in the context of Web-based collaborative customer service. Real-world business requirements were the key factors that dictated the design and architecture of these collaborative applications and as such, constitute the foundations for the paper.”
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Computer programs emerge as the outcome of complex human processes of cognition, communication and negotiation, which serve to establish the meaningful embedding of the computer system in its intended use context.
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URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/conferences/proceedings_of_the_1998_acm_conference_on_computer_supported_cooperative_work.html
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Mar 20th, 2010
