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 an empirical study of a synchronous messaging application with
group-oriented functionality designed to support teams in the workplace. In
particular, the tool supports group chat windows that allow members of a group
to communicate with text that persists for about a day. We describe the
experience of 6 globally-distributed work groups who used the tool over a
period of 17 months. An analysis of use shows that the group functionality was
used primarily for bursts of synchronous conversations and occasional
asynchronous exchanges. The content was primarily focused on work tasks, and
negotiating availability, with a smattering of non-work topics and humor.
Nearly all groups were remarkably similar in the content of their group chat,
although the research group chatted far more frequently than the others. We
conclude with suggestions for future research, and a discussion of the place of
team-oriented synchronous messaging tools in the workplace.”
“In this paper, we first describe a formative empirical study to inform the
design of CSCW tools to support idea finding in co-located groups. Groups of
students worked on creative problems with mapping and whiteboard tools in
different work modes. Concluding from the results of the study, requirements
are derived. A suite of tools that are informed by these requirements is
presented along with typical scenarios of their usage. The suite consists of
three software components covering a Mind-Mapping system (BeachMap), a novel
interaction technique for successive bottom-up structuring of ideas (MagNets),
and a PDA tool for asynchronous idea generation "on the road" (PalmBeach).”
“Current perceptions of Instant Messaging (IM) use are based primarily on
self-report studies. We logged thousands of (mostly) workplace IM conversations
and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to
prior research, we found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex
work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose
interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover,
people rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got
complex. We found evidence of two distinct styles of use. Heavy IM users and
frequent IM partners mainly used it to work together: to discuss a broad range
of topics via many fast-paced interactions per day, each with many short turns
and much threading and multitasking. Light users and infrequent pairs mainly
used IM to coordinate: for scheduling, via fewer conversations per day that
were shorter, slower-paced with less threading and multitasking.”
“Collaborative filtering has proven to be valuable for recommending items in
many different domains. In this paper, we explore the use of collaborative
filtering to recommend research papers, using the citation web between papers
to create the ratings matrix. Specifically, we tested the ability of
collaborative filtering to recommend citations that would be suitable
additional references for a target research paper. We investigated six
algorithms for selecting citations, evaluating them through offline experiments
against a database of over 186,000 research papers contained in ResearchIndex.
We also performed an online experiment with over 120 users to gauge user
opinion of the effectiveness of the algorithms and of the utility of such
recommendations for common research tasks. We found large differences in the
accuracy of the algorithms in the offline experiment, especially when balanced
for coverage. In the online experiment, users felt they received quality
recommendations, and were enthusiastic about the idea of receiving
recommendations in this domain.”
“This paper presents ReachOut, a chat-based tool for peer support,
collaboration, and community building. We describe the philosophy behind the
tool and explain how posting questions in the open directly benefits the
creation, distribution, and use of organizational knowledge, in addition to
enhancing the cohesion of the community involved. ReachOut proposes new methods
of handling problems that include locating, selecting, and approaching the
right set of potential advisers. We discuss the advantages of public
discussions over private, one-on-one sessions, and how this is enhanced by our
unique combination of synchronous and asynchronous communication. We present
and analyze results from a pilot of ReachOut and conclude with plans for future
research and development.”
“Technology can play an important role in enabling people to interact with
each other. The Web is one such technology with the affordances for sharing
information and for connecting people to people. In this paper, we describe the
design of two social interaction Web sites for two different social groups. We
review several related efforts to provide principles for creating social
interaction environments and describe the specific principles that guided our
design. To examine the effectiveness of the two sites, we analyze the usage
data. Finally, we discuss approaches for encouraging participation and lessons
learned.”
“This paper reports findings from a study of how a guidebook was used by
pairs of visitors touring a historic house. We describe how the guidebook was
incorporated into their visit in four ways: shared listening, independent use,
following one another, and checking in on each other. We discuss how individual
and groupware features were adopted in support of different visiting
experiences, and illustrate how that adoption was influenced by social
relationships, the nature of the current visit, and any museum visiting
strategies that the couples had. Finally, we describe how the guidebook
facilitated awareness between couples, and how awareness of non-guidebook users
(strangers) influenced use.”
“This paper examines the use of an interactive artwork that was designed by
members of the research team and exhibited at the Sculpture, Objects and
Functional Art (SOFA) Exposition in Chicago, USA. The paper uses audio-visual
recordings of interaction with and around the work to consider how people
encounter and make sense of an assembly of traditional objects and video
technologies. The analysis of action and interaction is used to develop a
series of 'design sensitivities' to inform the development of technological
assemblies to engender informal interaction and sociability in museums and
galleries.”
“Eleven PC-owning families were interviewed at home about their use of
conventional and digital photos. They also completed photo diaries and recorded
photo-sharing conversations that occurred spontaneously over a three month
period after the in-home interviews. From an analysis of the resulting
materials we illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of past and present
technology for photo sharing. These allow us to prioritise user requirements
for a range of future photo-sharing technologies or 'photoware'.”
“The paper proposes a refinement of the concept of 'Common Information
Spaces' (CIS), which has been proposed as a conceptual framework for the CWCW
field in order to provide analyses of cooperative work. The refinement is
developed through an introductory discussion of previous analyses of CIS and on
the basis of a thorough description of the CIS of a hospital ward based on
ethnographic fieldwork. The initially definition is refined by the introduction
of 7 parameters: (i) the degree of distribution of work; (ii) the multiplicity
of webs of significance; (iii) the level of required articulation work; (iv)
multiplicity and intensity of means of communication; (v) the web of artefacts;
(vi) immaterial mechanisms of interaction; (vii) the need for precision and
promptness of interpretation. These parameters provide a more detailed
conceptual framework and can be applied to characterize the particularity of a
given CIS.”
“This paper presents product concept design situations that occurred in
computer aided concept design workshops. These situations were analysed using
the concepts of activity theory to show how designers convey their
understanding across distance. From this analysis, hypothetical user activity
can be identified as an instrument of collaborative construction during design
action. It is a common design object and mediates between the designers along
with the future artifact. In order to support designers, future computer
systems should therefore bridge the gap between physical and virtual design
spaces. The concept of hypothetical user activity can be a means to organize
such a system.”
“Inter-organizational cooperation has specific requirements for access
control. The paper presents the results from a field study which looks at the
cooperation between two engineering offices and a steel mill. Based on these
findings we have developed new mechanisms for access control in groupware.
These mechanisms allow to restrict operations on shared data while or even
after they take place. The new access mechanisms can be decomposed and
implemented into a component-based framework. We show how this framework can be
extended to realize additional mechanisms for access control with little
efforts.”
“Balancing the needs of information distributors and their audiences has
grown harder in the age of the Internet. While the demand for attention
continues to increase rapidly with the volume of information and communication,
the supply of human attention is relatively fixed. Markets are a social
institution for efficiently balancing supply and demand of scarce resources.
Charging a price for sending messages may help discipline senders from
demanding more attention than they are willing to pay for. Price may also help
recipients estimate the value of a message before reading it. We report the
results of two laboratory experiments to explore the consequences of a pricing
system for electronic mail. Charging postage for email causes senders to be
more selective and send fewer messages. However, recipients did not use the
postage paid by senders as a signal of importance. These studies suggest
markets for attention have potential, but their design needs more work.”
“Instant Messaging (IM) is being widely adopted by teenagers. In a study of
16 teenage IM users, we explore IM as an emerging feature of teen life,
focusing our questions on its support of interpersonal communication and its
role and salience in everyday life. We qualitatively describe the teens' IM use
interpersonally, as well as its place in the domestic ecology. We also identify
technology adoption conditions and discuss behaviors around privacy management.
In this initial investigation, we found differences in the nature of use
between high school and college teens, differences we propose are accounted for
by teens' degree of autonomy as a function of domestic and scholastic
obligations, the development of independent work practices, Internet
connectivity access, and even transportation access. Moreover, while teen IM
use is in part characterized as an optimizing choice between multiple
communications media, practice is also tied to concerns around peer pressure,
peer group membership and creating additional opportunities to socialize.”
“Much of our daily communication activity involves managing interpersonal
communications and relationships. Despite its importance, this activity of
contact management is poorly understood. We report on field and lab studies
that begin to illuminate it. A field study of business professionals confirmed
the importance of contact management and revealed a major difficulty: selecting
important contacts from the large set of people with whom one communicates.
These interviews also showed that communication history is a key resource for
this task. Informants identified several history-based criteria that they
considered useful.We conducted a lab study to test how well these criteria
predict contact importance. Subjects identified important contacts from their
email archives. We then analyzed their email to extract features for all
contacts. Reciprocity, recency and longevity of email interaction proved to be
strong predictors of contact importance. The experiment also identified another
contact management problem: removing 'stale' contacts from long term archives.
We discuss the design and theoretical implications of these results.”
“In this study, we examine how geographic distance affects collaboration
using computer-mediated communication technology. We investigated
experimentally the effects of cooperating partners being in the same or distant
city on three behaviors: cooperation, persuasion, and deception using video
conferencing and instant messaging (IM). Our results indicate that subjects are
more likely to deceive, be less persuaded by, and initially cooperate less,
with someone they believe is in a distant city, as opposed to in the same city
as them. Although people initially cooperate less with someone they believe is
far away, their willingness to cooperate increases quickly with interaction.
Since the same media were used in both the far and near city conditions, these
effects cannot be attributed to the media, but rather to social differences.
This study confirms how CSCW needs to be concerned with developing technologies
for bridging social distance, as well as geographic distance.”
“In this paper we present the Clover architectural model, a new conceptual
architectural model for groupware. Our model results from the combination of
the layer approach of Dewan's generic architecture with the functional
decomposition of the Clover design model. The Clover design model defines three
classes of services that a groupware application may support, namely,
production, communication and coordination services. The three classes of
services can be found in each functional layer of our model. Our model is
illustrated with a working system, the CoVitesse system, its software being
organized according to our Clover architectural model.”
“Multi-user applications generally lag behind in features or compatibility
with single-user applications. As a result, users are often not motivated to
abandon their favorite single-user applications for groupware features that are
less frequently used. A well-accepted approach, collaboration transparency, is
able to convert off-the-shelf single-user applications into groupware without
modifying the source code. However, existing systems have been largely striving
to develop generic application-sharing mechanisms and undesirably force users
to share the same application in cooperative work. In this paper we analyze
this problem and present a novel approach (called intelligent collaboration
transparency) to addressing this problem. Our approach allows for heterogeneous
application sharing by considering the particular semantics of the applications
and the collaboration task in question.”
“Peer-to-peer systems appear promising in terms of their ability to support
ad hoc, spontaneous collaboration. However, current peer-to-peer systems suffer
from several deficiencies that diminish their ability to support this domain,
such as inflexibility in terms of discovery protocols, network usage, and data
transports. We have developed the Speakeasy framework, which addresses these
issues, and supports these types of applications. We show how Speakeasy
addresses the shortcomings of current peer-to-peer systems, and describe a
demonstration application, called Casca, that supports ad hoc peer-to-peer
collaboration by taking advantages of the mechanisms provided by Speakeasy.”
“Boundary objects are a critical, but understudied, theoretical construct in
CSCW. Through a field study of aircraft technical support, we examined the role
of boundary objects in the "achievement of safety" by service engineers. The
resolution process of repair requests was captured in two compound boundary
objects. These crystallizations did not manifest a static interpretation, but
instead were continually re-interpreted in light of meta-negotiations. This
suggests design implications for organizational memory systems which can more
fluidly represent the meta-negotiations surrounding boundary objects.”
“This is a case study of a public insurance company's conversion of
long-standing paper-based work processes to an electronic document management
system, "E-File", with imaging, data integration, and automated workflow. As a
transformational change, the E-File experience illuminates a range of effects
of information technology. Many effects were well-enough managed, through
participatory design and labor-management consultation, to yield an outcome
where over 90% of the highly skilled employees surveyed in the 1200
white-collar user population regard E-File as a substantially positive change.
What remain are some enduring challenges. Most notable are computerization
effects unique to knowledge work, combined with the constant changes associated
with information technology.”
“This paper derives from a study undertaken at an emergency service centre in
Sweden. The studies have focused on features of work familiar to the CSCW
community, including the documenting and analysing current work practices,
understanding the properties of the technology in question, and perhaps most
importantly how the technology functions in and through use. Our focus in this
paper exemplifies these themes through the analysis of two cases. In the first,
the issue in question is the way in which an emergency is identified and dealt
with, it being the case that a typical problem to be dealt with by operators,
and more commonly in the days of mobile telephony, is that of multiple
reporting of a single case. Of particular interest here is listening-in, which
is a function in the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system and by contrast that
of 'overhearing', which is not. The second case focus on the relevance of wall
maps, given the existence of computerized maps in these centres. Based on two
cases from emergency service centres, we will show that the concept of
awareness needs careful unpacking if we are to understand associated design
issues.”
“While systems supporting communities of practice in work organizations have
been shown to be desirable many, if not all, are decoupled from daily work
practices and tools. This hinders a wide collection of data about their
activities, because of the additional effort that is required from the users.
Therefore a pre-requisite for a system aiming at making visible the community
activity is the non-intrusive collection of data about the activities that are
carried on in a workplace. We present a range of personal document management
services that support the construction of a collective memory of user print
activities. We have internally tested the system and verified that it
successfully provided personal benefit, thereby ensuring that the system
receives sufficient usage for the shared memory to be useful. The system also
successfully addressed privacy concerns and effectively provided large data
sets about document related activities. Finally it provided information able to
trigger new or to reinforce existing informal exchanges in communities of
practice at a convenient moment; the print action.”
“One of the most challenging problems facing builders and facilitators of
community networks is to create and sustain social engagement among members. In
this paper, we investigate the drivers of social engagement in a community
network through the analysis of three data sources: activity logs, a member
survey, and the content analysis of the conversation archives. We describe
three important ways to encourage and support social engagement in online
communities: through system design elements such as conversation channeling and
event notification, by various selection criteria for community members, and
through facilitation of specific kinds of discussion topics.”
“A shared visual workspace is one where multiple people can see the same
objects at roughly the same time. We present findings from an experiment
investigating the effects of shared visual space on a collaborative puzzle
task. We show that having the shared visual space helps collaborators
understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and
ground their conversations efficiently. These processes are associated with
faster and better task performance. Delaying the visual update in the space
reduces benefits and degrades performance. The shared visual space is more
useful when tasks are visually complex or when actors have no simple vocabulary
for describing their world. We find evidence for the ways in which participants
adapt their discourse processes to their level of shared visual information.”
“The concept of awareness has received increasing attention over the past
several CSCW conferences. Although many awareness interfaces have been designed
and studied, most have been limited deployments of research prototypes. In this
paper we describe Sideshow, a peripheral awareness interface that was rapidly
adopted by thousands of people in our company. Sideshow provides regularly
updated peripheral awareness of a broad range of information from virtually any
accessible web site or database. We discuss Sideshow's design and the
experience of refining and redesigning the interface based on feedback from a
rapidly expanding user community.”
“Organizations, families, institutions evolve a shared culture and history.
In this work, we describe a system to facilitate conversation and storytelling
about this collective past. Users explore digital archives of shared materials
such as photographs, video, and text documents on a tabletop interface. Both
the software and the interface encourage natural conversation and reflection.
This work is an application of our ongoing research on systems for multiple,
co-present users to explore digital collections. In this paper, we present a
case study of our own group history along with the software extensions
developed for this scenario. These extensions include methods for easily
branching off from and returning to previous threads of the exploration,
incorporating background contexts that support a variety of view points and
flexible story sharing, and supporting the active and passive discovery of
relevant information.”
“We examined records of minute-by-minute computer activity coupled with
information about the location of the activity, online calendar appointments,
and e-mail activity. We present a number of visualizations of the data that
exhibit meaningful patterns in users' activities. We demonstrate how the
patterns vary between individuals and within individuals according to time of
day, location, and day of the week. Some patterns augment the schedule
information found in people's online calendars. We discuss applications for
group coordination (especially across time zones) plus opportunities for future
research. In light of the popularity of instant messaging, this research
identifies some of the benefits and privacy risks associated with the uses of
online presence and awareness information.”
“Most cooperative work takes place in information-rich environments. However,
studies of "information work" tend to focus on the decontextualized access and
retrieval problems faced by individual information seekers. Our work is
directed towards understanding how information management is seamlessly
integrated into the course of everyday activities. Drawing on an ethnographic
study of medical work, we explore the relationship between information and
temporal coordination and discuss the role of temporal patterns or "rhythms" in
providing individuals with the means to coordinate information and work.”
“Mutually-Immersive Mobile Telepresence uses a teleoperated robotic surrogate
to visit remote locations as a substitute for physical travel. Our goal is to
recreate to the greatest extent possible, both for the user and the people at
the remote location, the sensory experience relevant for business interactions
of the user actually being in the remote location. The system includes
multi-channel bidirectional video and audio on a mobile platform as well as
haptic feedback. This paper describes our first system prototypes and initial
experiences using them.”
“We describe a real-time 3-D augmented reality video-conferencing system.
With this technology, an observer sees the real world from his viewpoint, but
modified so that the image of a remote collaborator is rendered into the scene.
We register the image of the collaborator with the world by estimating the 3-D
transformation between the camera and a fiducial marker. We describe a novel
shape-from-silhouette algorithm, which generates the appropriate view of the
collaborator and the associated depth map at 30 fps. When this view is
superimposed upon the real world, it gives the strong impression that the
collaborator is a real part of the scene. We also demonstrate interaction in
virtual environments with a "live" fully 3-D collaborator. Finally, we consider
interaction between users in the real world and collaborators in a virtual
space, using a "tangible" AR interface.”
“We present a field study of police SWAT teams for the purpose of enabling
grounded design of a system to coordinate distributed field robots. The
mission-oriented, spatially distributed SWAT environment provides a rich
resource for robotics designers that mirrors field robot deployments in key
ways. We highlight the processes with which SWAT team leaders create and
maintain common ground among team members and coordinate action in these
tightly-coupled, distributed teams. We present a system for coordinating
distributed robots that we designed based on our SWAT team observations.”
“We present an experiment examining effects of gaze on speech during
three-person conversations. Understanding such effects is crucial for the
design of teleconferencing systems and Collaborative Virtual Environments
(CVEs). Previous findings suggest subjects take more turns when they experience
more gaze. We evaluated whether this is because more gaze allowed them to
better observe whether they were being addressed. We compared speaking behavior
between two conditions: (1) in which subjects experienced gaze synchronized
with conversational attention, and (2) in which subjects experienced random
gaze. The amount of gaze experienced by subjects was a covariate. Results show
subjects were 22% more likely to speak when gaze behavior was synchronized with
conversational attention. However, covariance analysis showed these results
were due to differences in amount of gaze rather than synchronization of gaze,
with correlations of .62 between amount of gaze and amount of subject speech.
Task performance was 46% higher when gaze was synchronized. We conclude it is
commendable to use synchronized gaze models when designing CVEs, but depending
on task situation, random models generating sufficient amounts of gaze may
suffice.”
“Gestural communication is an important part of shared work, both in
face-to-face settings and distributed environments. However, gestures in
groupware are often difficult to see and interpret because of disruptions to
their motion caused by network jitter. One way to improve the visibility of
remote gestures is by using traces-visualizations of the last few moments' of a
remote pointer's motion. We carried out an experiment to test the effectiveness
of traces in helping people interpret gestures. We found that telepointer
traces dramatically improved people's accuracy and confidence in their
decisions as jitter delays grew larger. Our results suggest that telepointer
traces and other visualizations of interaction history can be used to enrich
communication among remote collaborators.”
“In this paper we extend operational transformation to support synchronous
collaborative editing of documents written in dialects of SGML (Standard
General Markup Language) such as XML and HTML, based on SGML's abstract data
model, the grove. We argue that concurrent updates to a shared grove must be
transformed before being applied to each replica to ensure consistency. We
express grove operations as property changes on positionally-addressed nodes,
define a set of transformation functions, and show how to apply an existing
generic operational transformation algorithm to achieve this. This result makes
synchronous group editing applicable to the modern Web.”
“Bitmap-based collaborative graphics editing systems are a special class of
real-time collaborative editing systems. Undo is an important and difficult
problem in these systems. Existing solutions show low efficiency because
additional space cost should be added to achieve the function of undo. In this
paper, we propose a new solution to resolve the undo problem. The basic idea is
to reduce space cost through exploring relations among operations. The
algorithm given in the paper can undo any operation at any time, and can
greatly reduce the space cost while increasing a few time cost. The issues
about undo scope and undo mode are also discussed in the paper.”
“Notification is an essential feature in collaborative systems, which
determines a system's capability and flexibility in supporting different kinds
of collaborative work. In the past years, various notification strategies have
been designed for different systems. However, the design of notification
components has been ad hoc, and the techniques used for supporting notification
have been application-dependent. In this paper, we contribute a flexible
notification framework that can be used to describe and compare a range of
notification strategies used in existing collaborative systems, and to guide
the design of notification components for new collaborative systems. The
framework has been applied to the design of a notification component for a
group editor, which uses a single notification mechanism to support various
notification policies for meeting both real-time and non-real-time
collaboration needs. In addition, a new operational transformation control
algorithm has been devised in combination with the notification component,
which is significantly simpler and more efficient than existing algorithms.”
“Mobile technology requires new methods for studying its use under realistic
conditions "in the field." Reflexively, mobile technology also creates new
opportunities for data collection while participants are remotely located. We
report on our experiences with a variation on the paper-based diary study
technique, which we extend by using voice-mail paired with mobile and landline
telephony to more easily collect data in natural situations. We discuss lessons
learned from experiences with voice-mail diary studies in two investigations of
different scope. We also present suggestions for tailoring the technique to
different research objectives, garnering high subject participation, and
configuring the voice-mail system for data collection.”
“Good real time groupware products are hard to develop, in part because
evaluating their support for basic teamwork activities is difficult and costly.
To address this problem, we are developing discount evaluation methods that
look for groupware-specific usability problems. In a previous paper, we
detailed a new set of usability heuristics that evaluators can use to inspect
shared workspace groupware to see how they support teamwork. We wanted to
determine whether the new heuristics could be integrated into a low-cost
methodology that parallels Nielsen's traditional heuristic evaluation (HE). To
this end, we examined 27 evaluations of two shared workspace groupware systems
and analysed the inspectors' relative performance and variability. Similar to
Nielsen's findings for traditional HE, individual inspectors discovered about a
fifth of the total known teamwork problems, and that there was only modest
overlap in the problems they found. Groups of three to five inspectors would
report about 40-60% of the total known teamwork problems. These results suggest
that heuristic evaluation using our groupware heuristics can be an effective
and efficient method for identifying teamwork problems in shared workspace
groupware systems.”
“
Software design is the act of determining the user's experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user's whole experience.
”
-- David Liddle, From Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996
”
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URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/conferences/proceedings_of_the_2002_acm_conference_on_computer_supported_cooperative_work.html
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Mar 21st, 2010
