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Papers
The 41 papers at CSCW'98 are organized into 14 sessions, as detailed below.
Click on the session
name in the following list to jump to the relevant section of this page.
Alternatively, consult
the title index or
the author/presenter index.
Awareness of others and their actions (Mon. 11:00-12:30)
-
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.
Organizational culture: Memory and change (Mon. 11:00-12:30)
-
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.
Concurrency and consistency (Mon. 2:00-3:30)
-
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.
Supporting customer and health-care service workers (Mon. 4:00-5:30)
-
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.
Infrastructures for collaboration (1) (Mon. 4:00-5:30)
-
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.
Mirrors to the future: New interaction paradigms (Tue. 9:00-10:30)
-
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.
Infrastructures for collaboration (2) (Tue. 11:00-12:30)
-
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.
Primitives for building flexibile groupware systems (Tue. 2:00-3:30)
-
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.
-
The Dynamics of Mass Interaction
-
Steve Whittaker (stevew@research.att.com),
Loren Terveen,
Will Hill,
and
Lynn Cherny,
AT&T Labs Research, USA
Usenet may be regarded as the world's largest conversational
application, with over 17,000 newsgroups and 3 million users. Despite
its ubiquity and popularity, however, we know little about the nature of
the interactions it supports. This empirical paper investigates mass
interaction in Usenet. We analyse over 2.15 million messages from
659,450 posters, collected from 500 newsgroups over 6 months. We first
characterise mass interaction, presenting basic data about demographics,
conversational strategies and interactivity. Using predictions from the
common ground model of interaction, we next conduct causal modelling to
determine relations between demographics, conversational strategies and
interactivity. We find evidence for moderate conversational threading,
but large participation inequalities in Usenet, with a small minority of
participants posting a large proportion of messages. Contrary to the
common ground model and "Netiquette" guidelines, we also find that
"cross-posting" to external newsgroups is highly frequent. Our
predictions about the effects of demographics on conversational strategy
were largely confirmed, but we found disconfirming evidence about the
relations between conversational strategy and interactivity. Contrary to
our expectations, both cross-posting and short messages promote
interactivity. We conclude that in order to explain mass interaction,
the common ground model must be modified to incorporate notions of weak
ties and communication overload.
-
Envisioning Communication: Task-Tailorable Representations of Communication in Asynchronous Work
-
Christine M. Neuwirth (chris.neuwirth@andrew.cmu.edu),
James H. Morris,
and
Susan Harkness Regli,
Carnegie Mellon University, USA,
and
Ravinder Chandhok
and
Geoffrey C. Wenger,
Within Technology, Inc., USA
This paper reports on our efforts to improve interfaces for asynchronous
communication in which a group is communicating to solve a problem. We
report results from an observational study and an experiment and use them
as a basis for drawing design requirements: task-tailorable
representations, emergent representations, emergent sharing, public/private
elements in a layout, incremental formalization, and asynchronous
awareness. We describe an approach and prototype that embodies some of the
key requirements.
-
Coordination, Overload and Team Performance: Effects of Team Communication Strategies
-
Susan R. Fussell (susan.fussell@andrew.cmu.edu),
Robert E. Kraut,
F. Javier Lerch,
William L. Scherlis,
Matthew M. McNally,
and
Jonathan J. Cadiz,
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
The goal of this paper is to identify the communication tactics that allow
management teams to successfully coor-dinate without becoming overloaded,
and to see whether successful coordination and freedom from overload
inde-pendently influence team performance. We found that how much teams
communicated, what they communicated about, and the technologies they used
to communicate predicted coordination and overload. Team coordination but
not overload predicted team success.
From single-display groupware to mobility (Wed. 11:00-12:30)
-
Collaboration Using Multiple PDAs Connected to a PC
-
Brad A. Myers (bam@cs.cmu.edu),
Herb Stiel,
and
Robert Gargiulo,
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
The Pebbles project is creating applications to connect multiple Personal
Digital Assistants (PDAs) to a main computer such as a PC. We are using
3Com PalmPilots because they are starting to be ubiquitous. We created the
"Remote Commander" application to allow users to take turns sending input
from their PalmPilots to the PC as if they were using the PC's mouse and
keyboard. "PebblesDraw" is a shared whiteboard application we built that
allows all of the users to send input simultaneously while sharing the same
PC display. We are investigating the use of these applications in various
contexts, such as co-located meetings.
-
Tailorable Domain Objects as Meeting Tools for an Electronic Whiteboard
-
Thomas P. Moran (moran@parc.xerox.com)
and
William van Melle,
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, USA,
and
Patrick Chiu,
FX Palo Alto Laboratory, USA
Our goal is to provide tools to support working meetings on an electronic
whiteboard, called Tivoli. This paper describes how we have integrated
structured "domain objects" into the whiteboard environment. Domain objects
represent the subject matter of meetings and can be exchanged between
Tivoli and group databases. Domain objects can be tailored to produce
meeting tools that are finely tuned to meeting practices. We describe the
facility for tailoring and managing domain objects and the user interface
techniques for blending these into the whiteboard environment. We show
examples of both specific and generic meeting tools crafted from domain
objects, and we describe a long-term case study in which these tools
support an ongoing work process.
-
Mobility in Collaboration
-
Paul Luff (Paul.Luff@kcl.ac.uk)
and
Christian Heath,
King's College, London, UK
This paper explores an issue that has received little attention within CSCW
-- the requirements to support mobility within collaboration activities. By
examining three quite different settings each with differing technological
support, we reveal ways in which mobility can feature in collaborative
work. A focus on such activities may, on the one hand, suggest
enhancements to the current support offered for collaborative work and, on
the other, suggest a reconsideration of the requirements for mobile and
other related technologies.
Finding and sustaining relationships (Wed. 11:00-12:30)
-
Just Talk to Me: A Field Study of Expertise Location
-
David W. McDonald
and
Mark S. Ackerman (ackerman@ics.uci.edu),
University of California, Irvine, USA
Everyday, people in organizations must solve their problems to get their work
accomplished. To do so, they often must find others with knowledge and
information. Systems that assist users with finding such expertise are
increasingly interesting to organizations and scientific communities. But, as
we begin to design and construct such systems, it is important to determine
what we are attempting to augment. Accordingly, we conducted a five
month field study of a medium-sized software firm. We found the participants
use complex, iterative behaviors to minimize the number of possible expertise
sources, while at the same time, provide a high possibility of garnering the
necessary expertise. We briefly consider the design implications of the
mechanisms identification, selection, and escalation behaviors found during our
field study.
-
Sustaining Mentoring Relationships On-line
-
D. Kevin O'Neill (dko@acm.org),
University of Toronto, Canada,
and
Louis M. Gomez,
Northwestern University, USA
CSCW systems and research aim to sustain productive relationships over
barriers of time and space. For the most part, however, the CSCW
literature has focused on short-term relationships or collaborative
episodes. Here, we examine 37 lengthy email relationships between students
in grades 7 to 12 and volunteer scientists who advised them on lengthy
science projects. We consider the unique dynamics of these relationships,
illustrate their technical and social demands, and discuss the potential
for CSCW systems to help sustain long-term help relationships by better
accommodating their needs.
-
Cooperative Knowledge Work and Practices of Trust: Sharing Environmental Planning Data Sets
-
Nancy A. Van House (vanhouse@sims.berkeley.edu),
Mark H. Butler,
and
Lisa R. Schiff,
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Knowledge communities of all kinds have social and material practices for
deciding what is known and who is to be trusted. In this paper, we
address a specific kind of knowledge work, environmental planning, and a
particular form of collaboration, the sharing of measurement data sets.
We are interested in how trust is created; how trustability is assessed in
the arm's-length collaboration of sharing data sets; and how changes in
technology interact with those practices of trust. We look at several
elements of scientific practice that facilitate this sharing --
communities of practice, boundary objects, and assemblages -- and discuss
the implications for CSCW, digital libraries, and other
information-sharing applications.
Social filtering, social influences (Wed. 2:00-3:30)
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Using Filtering Agents to Improve Prediction Quality in the GroupLens Research Collaborative Filtering System
-
Badrul Sarwar,
University of Minnesota, USA,
Joseph A. Konstan (konstan@cs.umn.edu),
University of Minnesota/NetPerceptions, Inc., USA,
Al Borchers
and
Jon Herlocker,
University of Minnesota, USA,
Brad Miller,
NetPerceptions, Inc., USA,
and
John Riedl,
University of Minnesota/NetPerceptions, Inc., USA
Collaborative filtering systems help address information overload by using
the opinions of users in a community to make personal recommendations for
documents to each user. Many collaborative filtering systems have few user
opinions relative to the large number of documents available. This
sparsity problem can reduce the utility of the filtering system by reducing
the number of documents for which the system can make recommendations and
adversely affecting the quality of recommendations. This paper defines and
implements a model for integrating content-based ratings into a
collaborative filtering system. The filterbot model allows collaborative
filtering systems to address sparsity by tapping the strength of content
filtering techniques. We identify and evaluate metrics for assessing the
effectiveness of filterbots specifically, and filtering system enhancements
in general. Finally, we experimentally validate the filterbot approach by
showing that even simple filterbots such as spell checking can increase the
utility for users of sparsely populated collaborative filtering systems.
-
Evaluating Emergent Collaboration on the Web
-
Loren Terveen (terveen@research.att.com)
and
Will Hill,
AT&T Labs Research, USA
Links between web sites can be seen as evidence of a type of emergent
collaboration among web site authors. We report here on an empirical
investigation into emergent collaboration. We developed a webcrawling
algorithm and tested its performance on topics volunteered by 30 subjects.
Our findings include:
- Some topics exhibit emergent collaboration, some do not. The presence
of commercial sites reduces collaboration.
- When sites are linked with other sites, they tend to group into one
large, tightly connected component.
- Connectivity can serve as the basis for collaborative filtering.
Human experts rate connected sites as significantly more relevant and of
higher quality.
-
MUSICFX: An Arbiter of Group Preferences for Computer Supported Collaborative Workouts
-
Joseph F. McCarthy (mccarthy@cstar.ac.com)
and
Theodore D. Anagnost,
Andersen Consulting, USA
Environmental factors affecting shared spaces are typically designed to appeal
to the broadest audiences they are expected to serve, ignoring the preferences
of the people actually inhabiting the environment at any given time. Examples
of such factors include the lighting, temperature, décor or music in the
common areas of an office building. We have designed and deployed MusicFX, a
group preference arbitration system that allows the members of a fitness center
to influence, but not directly control, the selection of music in a fitness
center. We present a number of empirical results from our work with this
intelligent environment: the results of a poll of fitness center members, a
quantitative evaluation of the performance of a group preference arbitrator in
a shared environment, and some interesting anecdotes about members' experiences
with the system.
Supporting design activity: Observations and requirements (Wed. 2:00-3:30)
-
Designing Groupware for Congruency in Use
-
Wolfgang Prinz (wolfgang.prinz@gmd.de),
Gloria Mark,
and
Uta Pankoke-Babatz,
GMD-FIT, Germany
In this paper, we present experiences from long-term groupware development,
introduction, and use in an organization. We report lessons learned
concerning how a complex design process operates and how its components
interact. Our experiences suggest that the processes of requirement
analysis, system development, and user support need to facilitate the
merging of individual work patterns into congruent system usage. We confirm
the changing nature of groupware use by reporting empirical results
describing different learning phases.
-
Representing Fieldwork and Articulating Requirements through VR
-
James Pycock (pycock@xrce.xerox.com),
Xerox Research Centre Europe, UK,
Kevin Palfreyman and
Jen Allanson,
Lancaster University, UK,
and
Graham Button,
Xerox Research Centre Europe, UK
Virtual Reality has attracted much attention in CSCW as a means for
providing 'Collaborative Virtual Environments'. In this paper an
alternative use is made of VR for CSCW. Our work focuses not upon VR as
an actual interface to CSCW systems but as a means for providing a rich
environment in which to, firstly, represent the results of ethnographic
study and, secondly, to explore requirements for a collaborative system
by envisioning new work arrangements. We report on our use of VR in this
way and what it offers for supporting the transition between
ethnographic fieldwork and system design. We also report on the
transition from a 3D envisionment to designing a 2D system intended for
real world use.
-
Recomposition: Putting It All Back Together Again
-
Rebecca E. Grinter (beki@research.bell-labs.com),
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, USA
Design and development work have become increasingly interesting to CSCW
researchers. This paper introduces a new perspective for examining that
work: recomposition. Recomposition focuses on the activities required to
coordinate the assembly of an artifact. Using examples drawn from a study
of three software development organizations I show how recomposition is a
form of articulation work. I describe how that articulation work
influences the product produced, and how the product itself influences the
coordination required. I discuss the implications of a recomposition view
for CSCW research
SDM
/ cscw98-info@acm.org
/ July 30, 1998
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