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Workshops

Due date: (for position papers) Tuesday, September 1, 1998

Each workshop has a web page with submission details

Workshops are full-day (9:00am-5:30pm) events that provide participants with an opportunity to engage in focused discussions on a particular topic with a small group of like-minded researchers and practitioners. Participation in most workshops is limited to about 15 people, selected on the basis of short (3-4 page) position papers, representing views and experience relevant to the workshop topic.

Workshop attendance must be approved in advance by the workshop organizer. Before submitting a position paper, check the workshop web page or email the workshop organizer for additional information. Position papers should be sent to the address listed in the workshop descriptions below. Position papers should arrive no later than September 1, 1998.

There is a fee of $50 for workshop participation, to cover the costs of materials and refreshments. All workshops will be held on Saturday, November 14 at The Westin Seattle. The workshops are organized in cooperation with The Fifth Participatory Design Conference.

• W1: Methodologies for Evaluation
• W2: Towards Adaptive Workflow Systems
• W3: Identifying Constraints in Design
• W4: Understanding Professional Work and Technology in Domestic Environments
• W5: Changing Work Practice in Technology-Mediated Learning Environments
• W6: Internet-based Groupware for User Participation in Product Development
• W7: Designing Across Borders: The Community Design of Community Networks
• W8: Handheld CSCW
• W9: Collaborative and Cooperative Information Seeking in Digital Information Environments
• W10: Connectivity: Human and Technical
• W11: Designing Virtual Communities for Work
• W12: User-Centered Design in Practice - Problems and Possibilities

W1: Methodologies for Evaluation

Jean Scholtz, NIST, USA, Laurie Damianos, MITRE, USA, Andrew Greenberg, TASC, USA, and Robyn Kozierok, MITRE, USA

Room: Vashon I

This workshop will discuss different approaches used to evaluate CSCW systems. Our goal is to produce a taxonomy of evaluation methodologies for CSCW systems, identifying the type of systems for which a technique is most useful, the stage of development in which a methodology is appropriate, the resources needed to conduct an evaluation, and the appropriate measures for the various techniques. We plan to discuss various methods of data collection for collaborative work and identify the evaluation methodologies for which various types of data collection are most appropriate. Other issues we hope to discuss during the workshop include sharing and comparing collected data, the usefulness of standardized component tests, and the organization of evaluation results to make them more accessible to the development community. See our web page for the expected content of position papers. (http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/~cscw)

Send submissions to:

Jean Scholtz NIST Bldg. 225, A216 Gaithersburg, MD 20899 USA

phone: +1 301 975 2520 fax: +1 301 975 5287 email: jean.scholtz@nist.gov

W2: Towards Adaptive Workflow Systems

Mark Klein, MIT Center for Coordination Science, USA, and Chrysanthos Dellarocsa and Abraham Bernstein, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA

Room: St. Helens

Today's business environments are characterized by dynamic, uncertain and error-prone environments. To effectively support business processes in such contexts, workflow systems must be able to adapt themselves when deviations from the "ideal" process (i.e., "exceptions") occur. The goal of the workshop is to draw together researchers on adaptive workflow systems and help identify the breadth of current work, commonalities, gaps, potential collaborations and future research directions. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to methodologies and tools for detecting, understanding and resolving exceptions; infrastructures for dynamically modifiable process models; semi-prescriptive process models for dynamic environments; and empirical studies of exception handling in collaborative work settings. (http://ccs.mit.edu/klein/cscw-ws.html)

Send submissions to:

Mark Klein Center for Coordination Science (CCS) MIT Sloan School of Management One Amherst Street E40-169 Cambridge MA 02139 USA

phone: +1 617 253 6796 fax: +1 617 253 4424 email: m_klein@mit.edu

W3: Identifying Constraints in Design

Todd Cherkasky and David Levinger, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

Room: Adams

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. (http://www.rpi.edu/~cherkt/cscwpdc98/workshop.html)

Send submissions to:

Todd Cherkasky Department of Science and Technology Studies Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY 12180-3590 USA

phone: +1 518 276 8499 email: cherkt@rpi.edu

W4: Understanding Professional Work and Technology in Domestic Environments

Jon O'Brien, Lancaster University, UK, and Konrad Tollmar and Stefan Junestrand, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Room: Stuart

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. (http://www.nada.kth.se/cid/cscw98)

Send submissions to:

Konrad Tollmar CID - Centre for User-Oriented IT Design The Royal Institute of Technology S-100 44 Stockholm Sweden

phone: +46 8 790 6283 email: konrad@nada.kth.se

W5: Changing Work Practice in Technology-Mediated Learning Environments

Toni Robertson and Sue Fowell, University of New South Wales, Australia, and Penny Collings, University of Canberra, Australia

Room: Baker

The theme of this workshop is the relations between the rhetoric of choice, opportunity, and market advantage that surround the introduction of information technology into learning environments and the practice of those whose work includes the development and facilitation of courses in these environments. Our goal in this workshop is to clarify the dynamics between economic arguments for increasing the use of information technology teaching and learning environments; the very real educational potentials that technology-mediated environments offer; the industrial relations and work practice implications of developing and facilitating courses in these environments; and the changing opportunities for students in terms of access and participation in their education programs. (http://www.fce.unsw.edu.au/infs/5953/pdc/workshop.html)

Send submissions to:

Toni Robertson School of Information Systems University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 Australia

phone: +61 (0)2 9385 4949 email: t.robertson@unsw.edu.au

W6: Internet-based Groupware for User Participation in Product Development

Monica Divitini and Babak A. Farshchian, IDI, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, and Tuomo Tuikka, University of Oulu, Finland

Room: Cascade A

This workshop will focus on the adoption of Internet-based groupware for promoting user participation in collaborative development of both software and non-software products. We invite participation of both practitioners and academics. We aim to provide a forum for gaining better understanding of user participation in the product development process through the Internet, as well as of the support that can be provided through groupware systems. We therefore welcome position papers describing tools and prototypes, reporting on experiences, and identifying open problems in this area. (http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~igroup)

Send submissions to:

Monica Divitini IDI, NTNU 7034 Trondheim Norway

phone: +47 73593671 fax: +47 73594466 email: igroup@idi.ntnu.no

W7: Designing Across Borders: The Community Design of Community Networks

Doug Schuler, Evergreen State College, USA

Room: Vashon II

The workshop explores the current state and possible futures of networked (geographic) community communication and information systems ("community networks"). We are especially interested in how participatory design techniques can be integrated into public democratic design approaches and systems. We also believe that input from citizens as "lay designers" will provide an invaluable infusion of insight into the development of effective systems in civic and other realms. Finally, since these communication systems are becoming global in nature, we feel that issues about localism and globalism are extremely appropriate in the context of CSCW and geographically-based community systems. We will examine four main community design themes: (1) Looking at Innovative Regional Systems; (2) Theorizing About New Systems; (3) Recommendations and Future Directions; and (4) Critical Issues. (http://www.scn.org/ip/commnet/cscw-pdc-workshop.html)

Send submissions to:

Doug Schuler 2202 N. 41st Seattle, WA 98103 USA

email: douglas@scn.org

W8: Handheld CSCW

Hans-W. Gellersen, Telecooperation Office (TecO), University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Room: Cascade B

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. (http://www.teco.edu/hcscw/)

Send submissions to:

Hans-W. Gellersen Telecooperation Office (TecO) University of Karlsruhe Vincenz-Priessnitz-Str. 1 76131 Karlsruhe Germany

phone: +49 721 6902 49 fax: +49 721 6902 16 email: hcscw@teco.edu

W9: Collaborative and Cooperative Information Seeking in Digital Information Environments

Elizabeth Churchill, FX Palo Alto Laboratory, USA, Dave Snowdon, Xerox Research Center Europe, France, and Gene Golovchinsky, FX Palo Alto Laboratory, USA

Room: Olympic

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. (http://www.fxpal.com/CSCW98/)

Send submissions to:

Elizabeth Churchill FX Palo Alto Laboratory Inc. 3400 Hillview Avenue, Building 4 Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA

phone: +1 650 813 7024 fax: +1 650 813 7081 email: churchill@pal.xerox.com

W10: Connectivity: Human and Technical

Jolene Galegher, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Room: Glacier Peak

As opportunities for technological connectivity increase - between people and people, between people and organizations, and between organizations and organizations - new social forms are arising, and new opportunities for research are appearing. Examples include uses of the Internet by journalists, connections between marketers and systems designers in banks, and fully automated transactions within or between organizations. CSCW scholars of every stripe - from system builders to behavioral scientists - are invited to present theoretical, experiential or research papers, as well as examples of prototypes, either the real thing or a videotape. People from business with interesting or unusual examples to present or questions to ask of the research community are also invited to prepare short "hands on" papers describing issues or problems in their organizations. (http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/galegher/CSCWpdc/)

Submissions should be sent to:

Jolene Galegher Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA

email: galegher@andrew.cmu.edu

W11: Designing Virtual Communities for Work

Lori Toomey, FX Palo Alto Laboratory, USA, John C. Tang, Sun Microsystems, Inc., USA, Gloria Mark, GMD-FIT, Germany, and Lia Adams, Lia Adams Consulting, USA

Room: Cascade C

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. (http://www.fxpal.com/CSCW98virtual/)

Send submissions to:

Lori Toomey FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. 3400 Hillview Avenue, Bldg. 4 Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA

phone: +1 650 813 7780 fax: +1 650 813 7081 email: toomey@pal.xerox.com

W12: User-Centered Design in Practice - Problems and Possibilities

Jan Gulliksen, Uppsala University, Sweden, Ann Lantz, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Inger Boivie, Enator AB, Sweden

Room: Whidbey

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? (http://www.nada.kth.se/cid/pdc98/workshop/)

Send submissions to:

Jan Gulliksen Department of Human Computer Interaction Uppsala University Lagerhyddsvagen 18 SE-752 37 UPPSALA Sweden

phone: +46 18 471 28 49 fax: +46 18 471 78 11 email: jan.gulliksen@cmd.uu.se

Contents

Saturday evening, 6:00-9:30

• T1. A Grand Tour of CSCW Research

Sunday full-day, 9:00-5:30

• T2. A Technical Overview of CSCW
• T3. Activity Theory: Basic Concepts and Applications
• T4. The Theory and Practice of Fieldwork for System Development
• T5. Contextual Inquiry: Gathering Customer Data for System Development
• T6. Virtual Humans in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs)
• T7. Computer Support for Community Work: Designing and Building Systems for the "Real World"
• T8. Building Computer-Based Shared Information Systems
• T9. Avoiding Damn Lies: Understanding Statistics
• T10. Working through Collaboration: A Framework for Designing Technology Support
• T11. Developing Collaborative Applications on the World Wide Web
• T12. An Introduction to Distributed Cognition: Analyzing the Organizational, the Social, and the Cognitive for Designing and Implementing CSCW Applications.

Sunday morning, 9:00-12:30

• T13. Behavioral Evaluation of CSCW Systems
• T14. XML: Modeling Data and Metadata
• T15. Workflow Management: Concepts, Architecture, Implementation and Deployment

Sunday afternoon, 2:00-5:30

• T16. Using Social Network Analysis to Study Computer Networks: Theory, Methods and Substantive Findings
• T17. Theoretical Foundations of CSCL: How Do We Learn in Collaborative Settings?
• T18. The World Wide Laboratory: Conducting Experiments on the Internet

Saturday evening, 6:00-9:30

T1. A Grand Tour of CSCW Research

Jonathan Grudin, University of California, Irvine, USA, Steven E. Poltrock, The Boeing Company, USA, and John Patterson, Lotus Development Corporation, USA

Room: St. Helens

Origin: A highly-rated CSCW 96 tutorial.

Goals and content: An introduction to Computer Supported Cooperative Work research for those unfamiliar with the field. We provide a framework for understanding CSCW as a research domain, a development opportunity, and a management challenge. We present a taxonomy of CSCW technologies, explain the computing architectures of CSCW technologies, and analyze successes and obstacles to success.

This tutorial balances the social and technical issues that thread through this conference. It also identifies the conference events that expand on this social and technical framework.

Intended audience: Primarily designed for first-time attendees or those with a focused interest who would like a broad overview of contemporary CSCW research and the CSCW'98 Conference. Many people consider the comprehensive set of references to be worth the price of admission by itself.

About the instructors: Jonathan Grudin has worked as developer, researcher and consultant on CSCW and groupware. Steven Poltrock introduces, evaluates, and deploys groupware systems. John Patterson is developing architectures for synchronous groupwork. The first two instructors are the co-chairs of CSCW'98.

Sunday full-day, 9:00-5:30

T2. A Technical Overview of CSCW

Presun Dewan, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, USA

Origin: A highly-rated CSCW 96 tutorial.

Goals and content: In the past decade, a variety of systems (applications and infrastructures) have been developed to support collaboration. These systems have been developed in diverse fields including user-interfaces, multimedia, operating systems, database systems, programming languages, networking, computer hardware, distributed systems, and hypermedia. This tutorial will take the audience on a tour of these systems, discussing technical issues that arise in their design and implementation.

Intended audience: This tutorial will appeal to practitioners interested in state-of-the-art collaborative applications and infrastructures, and researchers interested in understanding the technical issues raised by the design of these systems. The tutorial will assume that participants are software developers, but will make no assumptions about their familiarity with the field of CSCW. Thus it will be accessible to "beginners" in this field.

About the instructor: Presun Dewan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina. His research interests are in infrastructure for implementing groupware, collaborative software engineering, object-oriented database systems, and distributed operating systems. He is also Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and a member of the IFIPWG2.7 group on Engineering for Human Computer Interaction.

T3. Activity Theory: Basic Concepts and Applications

Victor Kaptelinin, Umeå University, Sweden and Bonnie Nardi, AT&T Research, USA

Origin: A highly-rated CHI97 tutorial.

Goals and content: This tutorial introduces participants to Activity Theory, a conceptual approach that provides a broad framework for describing the structure, development, and context of computer-supported activities. The tutorial will consist of lectures, discussion and small group exercises. A Web community will be established so attendees will be able to continue to learn about and use activity theory.

Intended audience: Any researcher, designer or engineer who wants to understand how computers are used in the context of real activity will find this tutorial useful. Those interested in CSCW theory in general will also benefit.

About the instructors: Victor Kaptelinin is a Research Associate at the Department of Informatics at Umeå University and has written several articles on the relationship between activity theory and human-computer interaction. Bonnie Nardi is a member of the Human Computer Interface Department at AT&T's Information Systems and Services Research Lab and is the author of Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction (1996, MIT Press).

T4. The Theory and Practice of Fieldwork for System Development

Dave Randall, Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K. and Mark Rouncefield, Lancaster University, U.K.

Origin: A highly-rated CSCW 96 tutorial.

Goals and content: This tutorial has the objective of developing an appreciation of the various theoretical perspectives utilized by CSCW practitioners and the practical issues that arise during the conduct of "naturalistic" inquiry. A number of competing theoretical perspectives will be examined, compared, and contrasted, including "grounded theory," "soft systems," distributed cognition, ethnomethodology, participatory design, "business-led" perspectives, and activity theory. The tutorial will draw from the instructors' experiences working with design and management teams to illustrate many of the practical problems associated with doing fieldwork.

Intended audience: This tutorial will be useful for those embarking on observational studies, and for system developers who wish to become familiar with issues arising from the adoption of observational methods.

About the instructors: Dave Randall is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and has done work on air traffic control systems and retail financial systems. Mark Rouncefield is a researcher at the CSCW center at Lancaster University who has conducted fieldwork in the financial services sector.

T5. Contextual Inquiry: Gathering Customer Data for System Development

Karen Holtzblatt, InContext Enterprises, USA

Origin: A highly-rated CHI 98 tutorial.

Goals and content: This tutorial, taught by the originator of contextual inquiry, presents a practical introduction to the use of field research in designing computer systems that support and extend people's work. Contextual inquiry is a technique for interviewing and observing users in their own workplace as they work. The tutorial will develop skills in data collection, analysis, and use through hands-on examples of how to apply contextual inquiry throughout the system development cycle and how to adapt the approach to different situations.

Intended audience: Anyone interested in designing better products and systems from an in-depth understanding of customers can benefit from this beginning-level tutorial. This tutorial is of interest to human factors professionals, engineers, designers, managers, marketers, and writers.

About the instructor: Karen Holtzblatt has designed products and processes in the computer industry for the past ten years. She has led teams in customer-centered design to develop products, strategies, internal systems, and organizational structures. The techniques she pioneered are used and taught internationally. She is a co-founder of InContext Enterprises, Inc., a consulting firm leading design and management teams in using customer-centered approaches in their organizations.

T6. Virtual Humans in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs)

Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, University of Geneva, Switzerland and Daniel Thalmann, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland

Origins: An update of a highly-rated SIGGRAPH 97 course.

Goals and content: The merging of recent developments in virtual reality, human animation and CSCW has led to new fields of research: the integration of virtual humans in collaborative virtual environments; the interaction of humans with virtual humans; and the representation of humans in virtual worlds. This tutorial will emphasize real-time animation techniques, real-time motion tracking, and communication among humans and virtual humans, using examples of social behavior, group behavior, and crowd behavior. The course will also discuss facial animation techniques for virtual actors and communication with them. Finally, the interaction among humans and autonomous virtual humans inside the virtual space will be illustrated with applications in telecooperative work.

Intended audience: This tutorial is aimed at attendees with intermediate programming ability and requires some knowledge of computer graphics and virtual environments.

About the instructors: Nadia Magnenat Thalmann is the founder of Miralab at the University of Geneva and was previously on the faculty of the University of Montreal. Daniel Thalmann is a professor and director of the Computer Graphics Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

T7. Computer Support for Community Work: Designing and Building Systems for the "Real World"

Doug Schuler, The Evergreen State College, USA

Origin: This tutorial is new.

Goals and content: This tutorial is designed to introduce CSCW researchers and implementers to the field of public CSCW applications, services, and institutions (or, what I call "Computer Supported Community Work"). It is the goal of this tutorial to present the major challenges and opportunities involved in this endeavor and to engage all the participants in a dialogue as to the future of these new systems. Each participant should, after attending this tutorial, have a much clearer idea what systems might be developed and what they themselves can do to make them happen.

Intended audience: This tutorial is open to any interested person at any level of technical expertise.

About the instructor: Doug Schuler teaches in the Computers and Society area at Evergreen State College. He is one of the founders of the Seattle Community Network, a free, public computer network with over 12,000 registered users. Doug is also the author of New Community Networks: Wired for Change (1996, Addison-Wesley).

T8. Building Computer-Based Shared Information Systems

John Mariani, Lancaster University, U.K.

Origin: A highly-rated ECSCW 97 tutorial.

Goals and content: This tutorial compares and contrasts the use of real-world information artifacts and their electronic counterparts in traditional database systems, provides an understanding of the problems facing designers and implementers of shared information systems, and indicates how such systems can present awareness information to end-users. The tutorial will produce an understanding of the nature of shared information spaces, of the techniques used to realize shared information spaces, and of case studies about the design and development of shared information spaces.

Intended audience: People who are involved in, or expect to become involved in, the provision of a shared information system-including the design, implementation, or use of such a system. While the tutorial offers some technical content, the material will be accessible to end-users as well as to implementers.

About the instructor: John Mariani of the Computing Department and CSCW Center at Lancaster University has been part of national and international research teams working on shared information spaces, including the COMIC Shared Object Service.

T9. Avoiding Damn Lies: Understanding Statistics

Alan Dix, Staffordshire University, U.K.

Origin: A highly-rated CHI 98 tutorial.

Goals and content: Many practitioners and researchers in CSCW have to use statistics. However, many people, despite their ability to run a statistics package or calculate simple statistics, remain uncertain about what the numbers mean. This tutorial will produce an understanding of key statistical concepts enabling understanding and interpretation of statistical analyses.

Intended audience: This tutorial is intended for researchers and practitioners who have used statistics or have learned about statistics, but feel they need more depth of understanding. The tutorial assumes some prior knowledge of or experience with statistics-but it is not an advanced statistics course.

About the instructor: Alan Dix is Professor of Computing and Associate Dean at Staffordshire University. Before moving into CSCW research, he was a mathematician and professional statistician.

T10. Working through Collaboration: A Framework for Designing Technology Support

John L. Bennett, Independent consultant, USA and John Karat, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Origin: A highly-rated ECSCW 97 tutorial.

Goals and content: As we design computing technologies to support collaboration face to face and at a distance, it is important to have a basic understanding of what makes collaboration work. This tutorial focuses on distinctions among types of collaboration; the roles of conversations in establishing and maintaining collaboration; the importance of partnership in successful collaboration; and the role of culture in supporting collaboration. Examples of software support using a commercial product (Lotus Notes/Domino) and the World Wide Web will illustrate strengths and weaknesses of existing systems. Cases will be drawn from the papers review process for CHI'98 and from a longitudinal study of a customer service group.

After completing the tutorial, attendees should be able to formulate plans for designing, evaluating, installing, and bringing into practice technological support for collaboration.

Intended audience: Anyone interested in gaining new insights on fundamentals relating to collaboration, in seeing how collaboration can be facilitated to achieve desired results, and in considering the role of emerging technologies in support for collaboration.

About the instructors: John Bennett specializes in work with design teams developing systems that support effective human-computer interaction. While at IBM Research he served as an IBM Research Staff Member, project leader, manager, and consultant to development divisions. At several ACM SIGCHI annual conferences he taught (with people from Digital Equipment Corporation) tutorials on "Usability Engineering" and on "Contextual Inquiry" methods. He collaborated in producing the book Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd. He contributed "Building relationships for technology transfer" to the feature articles in the September, 1996, Communications of the ACM.

John Karat's current research is focused on improving the design process for usable systems. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Advisory Board, is the United States representative to IFIP TC 13 (Human-Computer Interaction) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Federation on Computing in the United States (FOCUS). He and John Bennett co-presented tutorials at CSCW94, CSCW96, and ECSCW97. He has been an instructor for the University of Michigan Summer Schools in Human-Computer Interaction since 1996. He organized workshops at CHI'91, CHI'94 and CSCW92, and built on the results of the CHI'91 workshop to produce an edited book outlining the area (Taking Software Design Seriously: Practical techniques for human-computer interaction design).

T11. Developing Collaborative Applications on the World Wide Web

Andreas Girgensohn, Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, USA and Alison Lee, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Origin: An update of a CSCW 96 tutorial.

Goals and content: Building collaborative applications from the ground up is a challenging task; one that requires balancing social, user interface, and technical concerns. The Web facilitates this task by providing building blocks that make it easy to rapidly develop collaborative applications. Using the Web helps lower the technical hurdles in the task and allows researchers, designers and developers to focus on exploring and understanding the sociological and HCI concerns. This tutorial demonstrates, with fragments of program and pseudo code, how the Web building blocks can be used to develop typical collaborative applications consisting of components such as awareness, shared objects, and conversational tools. Also, the tutorial highlights ways to address issues (e.g., interactivity, customization, data and tool integration, control, synchronization, firewall support, and security) related to using the Web as a development platform. The goal of the tutorial is to provide insights into and understanding of the Web building blocks and how to use the Web as a rapid prototyping platform for collaborative applications. At the end of the tutorial, participants will be able to begin developing Web-based collaborative applications.

Intended audience: This tutorial is intended for researchers, designers, and developers working on building CSCW applications or interactive Web content. Familiarity with Web browsers and at least one C-like programming language (e.g., C++, Java, Perl) is recommended.

About the instructors: Andreas Girgensohn and Alison Lee have backgrounds and experiences in computer science and human-computer interaction. They have developed tools and methodologies to support distributed group work. In the last four years, much of that development work has been carried out using the Web technologies.

T12. An Introduction to Distributed Cognition: Analyzing the Organizational, the Social, and the Cognitive for Designing and Implementing CSCW Applications.

Christine Halverson, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA and Yvonne Rogers, University of Sussex, U.K.

Origin: A highly-rated CSCW 96 tutorial.

Goals and Content: To introduce the theory of distributed cognition and elucidate its application to design and evaluation using real examples, and to provide experience to the participants by providing a hands-on example to work through. We will explain the importance of adopting multiple perspectives when designing and evaluating CSCW systems and groupware, and describe the analytic framework provided by distributed cognition. We will provide a detailed outline of the micro-methodology, a step-by-step walkthrough of analysis, and a guided hands-on analysis of a collaborative setting.

Intended audience: Anyone interested in a different way to analyze collaborative work.

About the instructors: Christine Halverson received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. For the last 3 years she has been a research staff member at IBM. Yvonne Rogers has a Ph.D. from the UK and is an associate research professor at the University of Sussex, where she teaches HCI, CSCW and cognitive science. Both instructors have used the distributed cognition methodology in many domains.

Sunday morning, 9:00-12:30

T13. Behavioral Evaluation of CSCW Systems

Thomas A. Finholt, University of Michigan, USA

Origin: A highly-rated CSCW 96 tutorial.

Goals and content: Evaluating CSCW systems is much more difficult than evaluating single-user systems because of the additional group and organizational factors. Behavioral evaluation consists of having people use CSCW technologies under appropriate conditions and gathering either qualitative or quantitative information about their behavior. We will examine a variety of methods, including case studies, large scale field studies, surveys, and laboratory studies.

Intended audience: This tutorial is appropriate for designers and adopters of CSCW systems, as well as researchers interested in understanding the use of such systems. Some familiarity with CSCW systems is recommended.

About the instructor: Tom Finholt is the director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work at the University of Michigan. His current research interests include collaborative science over the Internet and geographically distributed development teams in the automobile and telecommunications industries.

T14. XML: Modeling Data and Metadata

Rohit Khare, University of California, Irvine, USA and Adam Rifkin, California Institute of Technology, USA

Origin: This tutorial is new.

Goals and content: Designers of computer-supported cooperative work systems have long sought a portable information delivery format to share knowledge. Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides an effective solution for communicating across time, space, and communities. This tutorial introduces the family of Extensible Markup Language specifications to CSCW researchers and practitioners: XML, Namespaces, XSL (Styles), Xlink, Xpointer, RDF (Resource Description Format), and Schemas, as well as XML's interaction with other Web standards such as HTML, CSS, URI, and HTTP.

Intended audience: This tutorial is intended for CSCW developers evaluating the XML family of standards. No prior knowledge of markup languages, metadata systems, or knowledge representation is assumed.

About the instructors: Rohit Khare was a member of the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium and was Editor-In-Chief of the World Wide Web Journal. Adam Rifkin works with the Infospheres Project on the composition of distributed active objects. His work on Infospheres has received two conference best paper awards.

T15. Workflow Management: Concepts, Architecture, Implementation and Deployment

Christoph Bussler, The Boeing Company, USA

Origin: This tutorial is new.

Goals and content: This tutorial allows attendees to understand and characterize the field of workflow management and workflow management technologies in general. The tutorial will present and discuss the current state of workflow research, workflow standardization, and workflow products from a "neutral" viewpoint (i.e., independent of a specific philosophy or technology). The approach will be an overview of workflow concepts, architectures, and implementations-as well as references to current literature on workflow issues.

Intended audience: Anyone interested in workflow management, but specifically users of workflow management systems who would like to get a broader understanding and practitioners who want to understand the underlying concepts of preferred workflow products.

About the instructor: Christoph Bussler is project manager of a Workflow Management project. He is co-author of Workflow Management: Modeling Concepts, Architecture and Implementation.

Sunday afternoon, 2:00-5:30

T16. Using Social Network Analysis to Study Computer Networks: Theory, Methods and Substantive Findings

Barry Wellman, University of Toronto, Canada

Origin: A highly-rated GROUP 97 tutorial.

Goals and content: When a computer network connects people or organizations, it is a social network. The study of such computer-supported social networks has not received adequate attention. This tutorial will demonstrate the usefulness of a social network approach for the study of computer-mediated communication. Attendees will learn the principles, methods, and substantive findings of social network analysis, including: how to design social network research; how to collect social network data, and how to use standardized packages to analyze social network data.

Intended audience: This tutorial will be of interest to social analysts, system analysts interested in studying the links between Web sites, and developers interested in learning how to use social network data to design more effective groupware and "networkware."

About the instructor: Barry Wellman, a Professor of Sociology, founded the International Network for Social Network Analysis. He is currently studying the use of computer-mediated communication in loosely-coupled organizations and how residents of a highly-wired suburb use 100 Mb Internet access.

T17. Theoretical Foundations of CSCL: How Do We Learn in Collaborative Settings?

Timothy Koschmann, Southern Illinois University, USA

Origin: A CSCW 94 tutorial.

Goals and content: CSCL (Computer Support for Collaborative Learning) is an emerging area of research in educational technology. The tutorial will survey four prominent socially-motivated theories of learning (i.e., Vygotskyian, Neo-Piagetian, Social Practice Theory, and Distributed Cognition). Following the overview, working teams will undertake a task designed to deepen understanding of the four theories.

Intended audience: This tutorial is designed for CSCW researchers and developers interested in exploring the role of collaborative learning in supporting cooperative work. No prior background in educational theory will be assumed.

About the instructor: Timothy Koschmann is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado. He is a past program chair of CSCL '95 and conference co-chair of CSCL '97.

T18. The World Wide Laboratory: Conducting Experiments on the Internet

Daniel B. Horn, Elena Rocco, and Paul Resnick, University of Michigan, USA

Origin: This tutorial is new.

Goals and content: Behavioral experiments have traditionally been done within the walls of a lab. Studies of this type have many advantages (e.g., high degree of experimental control), but they have costs and limitations (e.g., use of participants from a limited geographic area). The Internet provides new avenues to conduct research, creating new opportunities for scholars and practitioners. This tutorial examines traditional and new kinds of studies that can be conducted on the Internet. Covered topics include recruiting participants, identity verification, data management, on-line payment, experimental design, and the design of experiment Web sites.

Intended audience: This tutorial is aimed at researchers interested in expanding their repertoire of methodologies to include Internet-based experiments. A basic understanding of experimental methods is recommended but not required.

About the instructors: Daniel B. Horn and Elena Rocco work at the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work at the University of Michigan. Paul Resnick was a co-developer of GroupLens and is a developer of PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), a set of technical specifications for the interoperation of Internet labeling and filtering systems.

Saturday, November 14, 1:30-5:30, and Sunday, November 15, 9:00-4:30, in Suite 3953

Ten participants were accepted from the disciplines that form CSCW, including computer science, cognitive science, sociology, etc. The abstracts of their work appear below. During the Colloquium, participants give a short informal presentation of their work, followed by an open discussion of their work. At the end of the session is a general discussion of career issues and research in CSCW.

Students welcome interest in their work. To contact Colloqium participants, please use the email addresses provided below. For more information about the Doctoral Colloquium, please contact Colloquium Co-Chairs Gary M. Olson (gmo@umich.edu) and Judith S. Olson (jsolson@umich.edu).

Panelists

• Judith S. Olson, University of Michigan, USA
• Gary M. Olson, University of Michigan, USA
• Carl Gutwin, University of Saskatoon, Canada
• Atul Prakash, University of Michigan, USA
• Joerge M. Haake, German National Research Center for Information Technology, Germany
• Yvonne Waern, Linköping University, Sweden

Student Presentations

• Grayson: The Effect of Proxemic Information in Video Mediated Communication
• Fry: Computer Mediated Communication Across Divergent Research Networks
• France: A Comparison of Video-Mediated, Face-to-Face and Audio-Only Group Communications
• Garbis: Communication and Co-ordination through Public Representations
• Nam: An Investigation of Multi-user Design Tools for Collaborative 3-D Modeling
• Hettinga: EVOLVE: EVOLutionary Aspects of Vidoeconferencing Explored
• Campbell: Concurrency Control for Real-Time Diagramming
• McDonald: Supporting Dynamic Recommendations in Organizational Information Systems
• Raybourn: Designing the DomeCityMOO Collaboratory
• Bergman: High-Level Requirements Analysis for Systems in Complex Work Settings

Abstracts

The Effect of Proxemic Information in Video Mediated Communication

David Grayson (david@mcg.gla.ac.uk), Multimedia Communications Group, University of Glasgow, U.K.

Proximity is arguably the most basic form of non-verbal communication and is known to affect the way that an interaction occurs, influencing factors such as dialogue, persuasion, trust and length of an interaction. So far it is unknown however whether proximity can have similar effects in Video Mediated Communication (VMC).

To investigate the possible effects of a stranger appearing close or far away, an experiment was devised simulating a financial advice transaction using a multimedia banking kiosk, where the financial advisor appeared either very close or far away. The experiment showed that when the financial advisor appeared very close, interactions were longer, with the customer saying more, making more interruptions, and having more turns than if the advisor appeared far away.

While this research indicates that perceived proximity may indeed have behavioral implications for interacting across a video link, future research aims to investigate further the precise nature both of the consequences and the reasons behind them. As part of this, Conversational Games Analysis (CGA) is used to examine the functional differences in the dialogue as well as the structural. Other issues raised by the research include the nature of familiarity and social presence.

Computer Mediated Communication Across Divergent Research Networks

Jenny Fry (j.fry@bton.ac.uk), School of Information Management, University of Brighton, U.K.

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.

A Comparison of Video-Mediated, Face-to-Face and Audio-Only Group Communications

Emma France (emma@mcg.gla.ac.uk), Multimedia Communications Group, University of Glasgow, U.K.

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.

Communication and Co-ordination through Public Representations

Christer Garbis (christer.garbis@tema.liu.se), Department of Communication Studies, Linköping University, Sweden

In my thesis work I am investigating the way in which teams of operators engage in co-operative process management, such as nuclear power plant control, use 'public representations', i.e., the artifacts representing information in such a way that it is commonly accessible and available to all team members at the same time (for example, a wall mounted electronic display). I am particularly interested in the role that these representations play for the operators' collective assessment and awareness of the state of the system that they are responsible for operating. In addition, I am researching the differences between accessing information through a 'public representation,' such as a fixed line diagram in the underground line control, and through 'private representations,' such as a single-user computer screen. It is my belief that the role and function of 'public' and 'private' representations in the above settings should be carefully studied so they can be designed in a more tightly coupled and integrated way in order to provide the operators with a sufficient and flexible mode of information.

An Investigation of Multi-user Design Tools for Collaborative 3-D Modeling

Tek-Jin Nam (Tek-Jin.Nam@brunel.ac.uk), Department of Design, Brunel University, U.K.

The objective of this research is to help designers working in teams by providing an improved collaborative design environment. The focus is on the investigation into specific issues and requirements for the development of multi-user CAD systems for collaborative 3-D modeling. By examining means for incorporating shared design workspace into conventional design workspace, we propose new mechanisms to transform existing CAD tools into collaboration-aware systems. From an initial experimental study of the team design process and a series of prototype development of collaborative CAD systems, a theoretical framework has been proposed and applied to the new collaboration-aware design systems. The result of the research will lead to the new generation of design tools to support team design tasks improving efficiency and effectiveness of team working.

EVOLVE: EVOLutionary Aspects of Vidoeconferencing Explored

Marike Hettinga (hettinga@telin.nl), Telematica Instituut, The Netherlands

The EVOLVE project focuses on evolutionary processes that take place after the introduction of videoconferencing in medical teleconsultation sessions. Evolution refers to what happens with patterns of work, including patterns of using a technology for particular purposes. As these patterns often divert from the patterns initially expected by designers, we believe that evolutionary processes are an important factor for the successfulness of the introduction of new technology. EVOLVE aims at yielding design guidelines for a better support of these evolutionary processes. These guidelines concern the technology (the "technical system"), as well as the organization of the use of the technology (the "social system"), and the relation between the technical and social system.

Concurrency Control for Real-Time Diagramming

Jeffrey D. Campbell (jeffc@sis.pitt.edu), Department of Information Science and Telecommunications, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Diagrams represent a design, concept or object. Multiple users working together simultaneously to create a diagram can interfere with each other's work. At a minimum this results in lost productivity. In undetected, the interference can cause inconsistencies or errors in the diagram greatly reducing its value. A concurrency control mechanism is needed to maintain integrity for collaborative diagramming. The method described here focuses on identifying logical units of work for collaborative diagramming. These units are analogous to transactions in a database system. This emphasis on transaction identification is a key distinction between this technique and prior CSCW concurrency control approaches. The improvement in transaction identification along with an implementation of split transactions reduces resource blocking, a problem generally found in applying locking techniques from database to CSCW applications.

Supporting Dynamic Recommendations in Organizational Information Systems

David McDonald (dmcdonal@ics.uci.edu), Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA

This work explores how information systems can be augmented to assist users in finding other individuals who are likely to have specialized, expert information that they need. In particular, this work considers the social and cognitive mechanisms that people use to find candidate sources of expertise. I recently completed a field study of information finding and sharing in a software development organization. The social and cognitive mechanisms identified during the study will be used to design and implement a system that can assist users with finding potential experts. The design and implementation of a system concomitant with an analysis of subsequent data are work in progress.

Designing the DomeCityMOO Collaboratory: A Multi-User Simulation in a Text-Based Networked Virtual Environment That Supports Non-Scripted Interactions Toward Intercultural Understanding

Elaine M. Raybourn (emraybo@sandia.gov), Sandia National Laboratories, USA

This proposal argues that designing a multi-user social-process simulation in a shared virtual environment offers unique opportunities to explore intercultural issues such as identity, power, and prejudice because its collaborative environment is much less threatening than face-to-face. In the proposed Text-Based Networked Virtual Environment (TNVE) also known as a Multi-User Dimension Object Oriented (MOO), players' narratives and experiences provide the basis for discovery and exploration in a virtual "collaboratory." The DomeCityMOO environment is unique in that it advances our state of knowledge of the effects of designing a non-scripted collaborative social process simulation which supports both group and individual intercultural learning in a shared virtual space.

High-Level Requirements Analysis for Systems in Complex Work Settings

Mark Bergman (mbergman@ics.uci.edu), Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA

Large scale intra- and interorganizational information systems development has failed to yield useful systems ~50% of the time. It appears that one cause of these failures is the misunderstanding or overlooking of organizational and institutional requirements in the design of these systems. High-level requirements analysis is being created as one way to start to address this problem. It is a new methodology that can be used to gather organizational, institutional as well as technical information system requirements. Research is being performed to determine how to build a high-level requirements analysis framework. Then, research will continue in applying the framework to identify critical individual or combinations of technical, organizational, institutional requirements for a "real life" project that have been misunderstood or overlooked. Beyond this, high-level requirements analysis should allow for increased insights in (1) requirements analysis, (2) complex system design which contains technological, organizational, and institutional factors, (3) how technology, organizations, and institutions co-evolve over time, (4) policy creation in the development and governance of these types of systems, and (5) how to build, maintain, and improve a high-level requirements extraction and analysis system. Altogether, this sets up a research framework that may eventually yield solutions to become much more successful at either implementing large scale intra- and interorganizational information systems or knowing when not to build them.

Collective IQ and a Framework for Bootstrapping our Society - ACM Turing Award Lecture

Douglas Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute, USA

Doug Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute founder and Director, has an unparalleled 30-year track record in predicting, designing, and implementing the future of organizational computing. From his early vision of turning organizations into augmented knowledge workshops, he went on to pioneer what is now known as collaborative hypermedia, knowledge management, community networking, and organizational transformation.

Well-known technological firsts include the mouse, display editing, windows, cross-file editing, outline processing, hypermedia, and groupware. Integrated prototypes were in full operation under the NLS system, as early as 1968. In the last decade of its continued evolution, thousands of users have benefited from its unique team support capabilities.

After 20 years directing his own lab at SRI, and 11 years as senior scientist, first at Tymshare, and then at McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute, where he is working closely with industry and government stakeholders to launch a collaborative implementation of his work.

Engelbart has received numerous awards for outstanding lifetime achievement and ingenuity, including ACM's 1997 A.M. Turing Award. His life's work, with his "big-picture" vision and persistent pioneering breakthroughs, has made a significant impact on the past, present, and future of personal, interpersonal, and organizational computing.

OfficeWalker: A Virtual Visiting System Based on Proxemics

Akihiko Obata (obata@flab.fujitsu.co.jp) and Kazuo Sasaki, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Japan

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.

Evaluating Image Filtering Based Techniques in Media Space Applications

Qiang Alex Zhao (azhao@cc.gatech.edu) and John T. Stasko, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

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.

Interlocus: Workspace Configuration Mechanisms for Activity Awareness

Takahiko Nomura (Takahiko.Nomura@fujixerox.co.jp), Koichi Hayashi, and Tan Hazama, Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd., Japan, and Stephan Gudmundson, University of British Columbia, Canada

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.

The Long and Winding Road: Collaborative IT and Organisational Change

Helena Karsten (eija@jytko.jyu.fi), University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Matthew Jones, University of Cambridge, UK

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.

Considering an Organization's Memory

Mark S. Ackerman (ackerman@ics.uci.edu), University of California, Irvine, USA, and Christine Halverson, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA

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.

Diaries at Work

Mikko Kovalainen and Mike Robinson (mike@cs.jyu.fi), University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Esa Auramaki, Solution Garden Ltd., Finland

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.

An Internet Paradox: A Social Medium That May Undermine Sociability

Sara Kiesler (Chair) and Robert Kraut, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, Judith Donath, MIT, USA, Barry Wellman, University of Toronto, Canada, and Howard Rheingold, Independent consultant

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.

Operational Transformation in Real-Time Group Editors: Issues, Algorithms, and Achievements

Chengzheng Sun (C.Sun@cit.gu.edu.au), Griffith University, Australia, and Clarence (Skip) Ellis, University of Colorado, USA

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.

Operation Transforms for a Distributed Shared Spreadsheet

Christopher R. Palmer and Gordon V. Cormack (gvcormack@plg.uwaterloo.ca), University of Waterloo, Canada

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.

Responsiveness and Consistency Tradeoffs in Interactive Groupware

Sumeer Bhola (sumeerb@cc.gatech.edu), Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, Guruduth Banavar, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA, and Mustaque Ahamad, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

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.

Designing for the Dynamics of Cooperative Work Activities

Jakob Bardram (bardram@daimi.aau.dk), Aarhus University, Denmark

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.

Collaborative Customer Services Using Synchronous Web Browser Sharing

Makoto Kobayashi (mkobaya@jp.ibm.com), Masahide Shinozaki, and Takashi Sakairi, IBM Research, Tokyo Research Laboratory, Japan, and Maroun Touma, Shahrokh Daijavad, and Catherine G. Wolf, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA

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.

Talking to Customers on the Web: A Comparison of Three Voice Alternatives

Qiping Zhang (qiping@umich.edu), University of Michigan/CREW, USA, and Catherine G. Wolf, Shahrokh Daijavad, and Maroun Touma, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA

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.

Out of This World: An Extensible Session Architecture for Heterogeneous Electronic Landscapes

Jonathan Trevor (jonathan@comp.lancs.ac.uk), Tom Rodden, and Gareth Smith, Lancaster University, UK

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.

Ubiquitous Collaboration Via Surface Representations

Dan R. Olsen, Jr., Scott E. Hudson (hudson@cs.cmu.edu), Matt Phelps, Jeremy Heiner, and Thom Verratti, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

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.

Rapidly Building Synchronous Collaborative Applications by Direct Manipulation

Guruduth Banavar (banavar@watson.ibm.com), Sri Doddapaneni, Kevan Miller, and Bodhi Mukherjee, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA

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.

HyperMirror: Toward Pleasant-to-use Video Mediated Communication System

Osamu Morikawa (morikawa@nibh.go.jp), National Institute of Bioscience and Human-Technology, Japan, and Takanori Maesako, Osaka University, Japan

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 and Community Mirrors: Moving from Conferences to Collaboration

Richard Borovoy (borovoy@media.mit.edu), Fred Martin, Sunil Vemuri, Mitchel Resnick, Brian Silverman, and Chris Hancock, MIT Media Lab, USA

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.

Tangible Interfaces for Remote Collaboration and Communication

Scott Brave (brave@media.mit.edu), Hiroshi Ishii, and Andrew Dahley, MIT Media Lab, USA

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.

Everyone is Talking About Knowledge Management

Irene Greif, Lotus Research, USA (Chair)

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.

COCA: Collaborative Objects Coordination Architecture

Du Li (lidu@cs.ucla.edu) and Richard R. Muntz, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

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 framwork 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.

Artefact: A Framework for Low-Overhead Web-Based Collaborative Systems

Jeff Brandenburg (jeffb@persimmon.com), Boyce Byerly, Tom Dobridge, Jinkun Lin, Dharmaraja Rajan, and Timothy Roscoe, Persimmon I.T., Inc., USA

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.

Supporting Flexible Roles in a Shared Space

Randall B. Smith (Randall.Smith@Eng.Sun.com), Ronald Hixon, and Bernard Horan, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, USA

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.

Design for Individuals, Design for Groups: Tradeoffs between Power and Workspace Awareness

Carl Gutwin (gutwin@cs.usask.ca), University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and Saul Greenberg, University of Calgary, Canada

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.

Fragmented Interaction: Establishing Mutual Orientation in Virtual Environments

Jon Hindmarsh (jon.hindmarsh@kcl.ac.uk), King's College, London, UK, Mike Fraser, University of Nottingham, UK, Christian Heath, King's College, London, UK, and Steve Benford and Chris Greenhalgh, University of Nottingham, UK

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.

Six Readings of a Single Text: A Videoanalytic Session

Timothy Koschmann, Southern Illinois University, USA (Chair), Anne Anderson, University of Glasgow, UK, Rogers Hall, University of California, Berkeley, USA, Christian Heath, Kings College, London, UK, Curtis LeBaron, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, Judith Olson, University of Michigan, USA, and Lucy Suchman, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, USA

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.

Exploring the Design Space for Notification Servers

Devina Ramduny (D.Ramduny@soc.staffs.ac.uk) and Alan Dix, Staffordshire University, UK, and Tom Rodden, Lancaster University, UK

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.

Re-Coupling Tailored User Interfaces

Gareth Smith (gbs@comp.lancs.ac.uk) and Jon O'Brien, Lancaster University, UK

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 graphical displays.

Flexible Meta Access-Control for Collaborative Applications

Prasun Dewan (dewan@cs.unc.edu), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA, and HongHai Shen, IBM Santa Teresa Lab, USA

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, delega- tion of access rights, and both shallow and deep revocation. It should also be easy to implement in a variety of applica- tions, 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 imple- mented 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.

TeamWave Workplace

Mark Roseman (roseman@teamwave.com), TeamWave Software Ltd., Canada

TeamWave Workplace is one of the few commercial products supporting both real-time and asynchronous collaboration. Using a rooms metaphor, it combines chat, audio/video, whiteboards, calendars, bulletin boards, and other groupware tools in a fully persistent work environment, all running on Windows, Macintosh and Unix platforms. This demonstration will highlight not only the individual components in TeamWave, but also how the system works to integrate them together into a single cohesive environment.

WebGuide: Guiding Cooperative Work on the Web with Perspectives and Negotiation Support

Gerry Stahl (Gerry.Stahl@Colorado.edu) and Rogerio dePaula, Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, and Thomas Herrmann and Kai-Uwe Loser, Informatik und Gesellschaft, Universität Dortmund, Germany

Cooperative knowledge work typically involves a mix of individual and group activities. Computer support for both personal and team perspectives allows people to view and work on a central information repository in personal, subgroup, and team contexts. Negotiation mechanisms support the merger of information developed and proposed by individuals or subgroups into perspectives representing convergence of group ideas. By intertwining perspective and negotiation mechanisms, a presentation or product representing group consensus can systematically be constructed from the individual results while work on personal ideas progresses within private workspaces. WebGuide is a prototype system that integrates perspective and negotiation mechanisms to support web-based cooperation. It is currently being developed to support two diverse group research projects; the demo will feature the current state of these research collaborations as represented within WebGuide.

ToolSpace: A Next Generation Computing Environment

T. Goddard (goddard@mathcs.emory.edu) and V. S. Sunderam, Emory University, USA

User interfaces have evolved from punched cards, to text terminals, to windowing systems. As interface standards move into the third dimension, we have the opportunity to ensure that they inherently support cooperative work as well as other modern ideas from areas such as component software and distributed systems. ToolSpace is our prototype of such an environment.

Using VRML and Java, ToolSpace workspaces are available over the web through essentially a standard web browser installation. Within the workspace, users can interact with shared objects and applications in real time. With a software abstraction called "tools", applications can scale with number of users, degrees of freedom of input devices, and sophistication of input filtering.

Patient Support Using the World Wide Web

John E. Lester (Lester@helix.mgh.harvard.edu), Deirdre M. Norris, R.N., and Daniel B. Hoch, Ph.D., M.D., Partners HealthCare Neurology Department, MGH Epilepsy Service, VBK 830, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA

Traditional medical care relies on face-to-face encounters in which patient and physician work in a collaborative fashion. However, many patients have limited mobility, want additional medical information and wish to share experiences with others in similar medical circumstances. This demonstration illustrates how the WWW can be used as a computer-based tool to augment the physician-patient encounter at an Epilepsy referral center. During this presentation we show how patients and providers use WWW resources running on commercial software. Patients are given access to a library, discussion groups, chatrooms, and the opportunity to communicate privately with healthcare providers. Patients were included in the design process and are involved in the evolution of the site. Monitoring of the project is performed by Epilepsy care providers. We are in the process of examining the impact of this technology on patient satisfaction, quality of life and comparing/contrasting its use to traditional face-to-face encounters.

WebShaman -- Collaborative Virtual Prototyping in the World Wide Web for Product Designers

Pertti Repo, Jarmo Sarkkinen, and Tuomo Tuikka (Tuomo.Tuikka@oulu.fi), HCI & Group Technology Laboratory, Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, Finland, and Marko Salmela, VTT Electronics, Finland

This demonstration presents a World Wide Web based collaborative virtual prototyping system -- WebShaman. The system was designed after a series of field studies in interdisciplinary collaborative electronics product design. It illustrates how to support synchronous concept design over the WWW, where three dimensional product concepts, design objects, can be shown, manipulated, and simulated in common information space. Thus two or more electronics product designers or their customers can work on a common design object in synchronous collaboration using distributed simulation to mediate their understanding with each others. To facilitate this a techniques which we call 'smart virtual prototyping' is demonstrated. It is a special technique which allows users to add functionality and simulation to virtual prototypes and use them in a collaborative fashion. (See: http://www.hci.oulu.fi/WebShaman.html)

The Hummingbird: Mobile Support for Group Awareness

Lars Erik Holmquist (leh@viktoria.informatik.gu.se), Joakim Wigström, and Jennica Falk, PLAY Research Group, Viktoria Research Institute, Sweden

The Hummingbird is a small portable device which supports social awareness between people who frequent the same physical location. The Hummingbird uses wireless communication to give members of a group continuous aural and visual indications of which other group members are in the vicinity. Although many solutions for providing awareness information exist, they are either tied to the desktop (e.g., ICQ) or dependent on a pre-existing infrastructure (e.g., Active Badges). Hummingbirds have the advantage of working any time, anywhere, which will be shown in this demonstration.

We will let attendees get hands-on experience with the Hummingbird prototype, but the demonstration will not be limited to the demo room. Attendees will be allowed to borrow Hummingbirds and use them in the conference area. In this way, participants will be able to explore how Hummingbirds can support group awareness during a conference situation.

WebPath: Synchronous Collaborative Browsing

Paul Moody (paul_moody@lotus.com), Lotus Development Corporation, USA

Pathing, trails and guided tours of hypertext have been shown to be valuable means of sharing browsing experiences. Our WebPath project implemented a pathing system for use with a web browser with the addition of awareness, real-time chatting, and sharing of current browse locations. Our experiences using the system led to several new collaborative browsing activities using paths. In this demo, we will show our system and demonstrate so