CSCW

This field experiment investigates individual, structural and social influences on the use of two video telephone systems. One system flourished, while an equivalent system died. We use a time series design and multiple data sources to test media ...

The Montage prototype provides lightweight audio-video glances among distributed collaborators and integrates other applications for coordinating future contact. We studied a distributed group across three conditions: before installing Montage, with ...

An approach supporting spatial workspace collaboration via a video-mediated communication system is described. Based on experimental results, the following were determined to be the system requirements to support spatial workspace collaboration: ...

In this paper, we look at how people working in a governmental labor inspection agency tailor their shared PC environment. Starting with standard off-the-shelf software, the tailors adapt that software to the particular workplace in which they are ...

This study found that the use of a computer conferencing system in an R&D lab was significantly shaped by a set of intervening actors—mediators—who actively guided and manipulated the technology and its use over time. These mediators adapted the ...

Integrating CSCW systems to organisations is highly complex. This paper examines the co-evolution process involved in tailoring a CSCW system to fit in with the current organisational structure, whilst concurrently adapting the working practices to ...

This paper discusses a conceptual model of groupware consisting of three complementary components or models: a description of the objects and operations on these objects available in the system; a description of the activities (and their orderings) that ...

The debate on the language/action perspective has been receiving attention in the CSCW field for almost ten years. In this paper, we recall the most relevant issues raised during this debate, and propose a new exploitation of the language/action ...

This paper examines the relationship between cooperative work and the wider organizational context. The purpose of the exploration is not to contribute to organizational theory in general, but to critique the transaction cost approach to organizational ...

Workflow management is a technology that is considered strategically important by many businesses, and its market growth shows no signs of abating. It is, however, often viewed with skepticism by the research community, conjuring up visions of oppressed ...

The correct and timely creation of systems for coordination of group work depends on the ability to express, analyze, and experiment with protocols for managing multiple work threads. We present an evolution of the Trellis model that provides a formal ...

The Virtual Notebook System (VNS) is a distributed collaborative hypertext system that has made a successful transition from research prototype to commercial product. Experience in developing and deploying the VNS in diverse settings including ...

This paper reports research to define a set of interaction parameters that collaborative writers will find useful. Our approach is to provide parameters of interaction and to locate the decision of how to set the parameters with the users. What is new ...

The ability to share synchronized views of interactions with an application is critical to supporting synchronous collaboration. This paper suggests a simple synchronous collaboration paradigm in which the sharing of the views of user/application ...

DUPLEX is a distributed collaborative editor for users connected through a large-scale environment such as the Internet. Large-scale implies heterogeneity, unpredictable communication delays and failures, and inefficient implementations of techniques ...

Collaborative filters help people make choices based on the opinions of other people. GroupLens is a system for collaborative filtering of netnews, to help people find articles they will like in the huge stream of available articles. News reader clients ...

Current collaborative learning systems focus on maximizing shared information. However, “meaningful learning” is not simply information sharing but, more importantly, knowledge construction. CLARE is a computer-supported learning environment that ...

Summary reports are the periodic assemblings of text, numbers, and other data, drawn from diverse sources to present a picture of some aspect of an organization's state. They have become ubiquitous in organizations with the advent of computers, but are ...

This paper exposes the concurrency control problem in groupware when it is implemented as a distributed system. Traditional concurrency control methods cannot be applied directly to groupware because system interactions include people as well as ...

This paper examines the importance of providing effective management of sharing in cooperative systems and argues for a specialised service to support the cooperative aspects of information sharing. The relationship between features of the cooperative ...

The need to merge different versions of an object to a common state arises in collaborative computing due to several reasons including optimistic concurrency control, asynchronous coupling, and absence of access control. We have developed a flexible ...

A growing concern for organizations and groups has been to augment their knowledge and expertise. One such augmentation is to provide an organizational memory, some record of the organization's knowledge. However, relatively little is known about how ...

This paper analyzes the initial phases of a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community System (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and ...

The pattern of CSCW system users helping other using to resolve problems and make more effective use of such tools has been observed in a variety of settings, but little is known about how help patterns develop or their effects. Results from a pre-post ...

Ethnographic studies of CSCW have often seemed to involve the investigation of relatively large-scale and highly specific systems, consequently ignoring the small office within which many people spend much of their working lives and which is a major ...

This paper reports on a field study of the procurement, implementation and use of a local area network devoted to running CSCW-related applications in an organization within the U.K.'s central government. In this particular case, the network ran into a ...

Computer-mediated small group research has focused efforts on the medium of electronically networked text-based messages. An experiment which instead combines a synchronous text-based messaging medium with two-dimensional interactive computer graphics ...

This paper presents AlphaDeltaPhi-groups (ADP-group) as a communication tool for connection level management in distributed CSCW systems. In order to accurately model CSCW communication patterns, an ADP-group is a related set of cooperating processes ...

Session management systems for collaborative applications have required a great deal of reimplementation work by developers because they have been typically created on a case-by-case basis. Further, artifacts of this development process have limited the ...

DIVA, a novel environment for group work, is presented. This prototype virtual office environment provides support for communication, cooperation, and awareness in both the synchronous and asynchronous modes, smoothly integrated into a simple and ...