CSCW'98 Program: Panels

PROGRAM

CSCW'98 Benefactors:

CSCW'98 Sponsors:

Panels

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.

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.

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.

Cooperative Buildings: Integrating Information, Organization, & Architecture: Norbert Streitz, GMD-IPSI, Germany (Chair), Volker Hartkopf, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA, Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Media Lab, USA, Simon Kaplan, University of Queensland, Australia, and Thomas P. Moran, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, USA; Future work, cooperation, and organizations will be characterized by greater dynamics, flexibility and mobility. Realizing this goal has profound implications for information and communication technology as well as architecture because virtual and physical spaces have to be designed in an integrated fashion to provide equally flexible cooperative work environments. We will outline a challenging generation of new problems and issues which are likely to shape future CSCW and building research.