Browsing by Subject "groupware"

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    Journal Article
    A Coordination Language For Building Collaborative Applications
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 9, No. 1, 36586) Cortes, Mauricio
    A collaborative application must support theinteraction of a group of users that share someinformation and have common or complementary goals.Many conflicting situations can arise during acomputer supported meeting when two or moreparticipants access this shared information. Inaddition to data consistency issues (data-levelconflicts), collaborative applications must addressthe specification of interaction rules to control theway users can interact through the application(user-level conflicts) with each other. Theseinteraction rules can vary from session to session,and even during the same session, as users need toestablish new ways to interact with each other. We have developed a coordination programming languagethat helps programmers build new collaborativeapplications or reengineer single-user applications.This language allows programmers to decouplecoordination from computational issues. While acomputational program describes the information thatis being shared, a coordination program determines howa group of users can share this information. Given acomputational program, developers can build multiplecoordination programs. End-users will be able toselect the coordination program that best suit theirneeds to run their collaborative session. A language runtime interpreter executes thesecoordination programs. This interpreter controls theexecution of user actions that are applied to the setof shared objects. Finally, new coordination programscan be loaded in the runtime interpreter at any time,allowing end-users to change the interaction rulesduring an ongoing collaborative session. A descriptionof the runtime interpreter and its implementation isincluded.
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    Journal Article
    A Multi-Versioning Scheme for Intention Preservation in Collaborative Editing Systems*
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 17, 2008) Xue, Liyin; Orgun, Mehmet A.; Zhang, Kang
    Although the multi-version approach to consistency maintenance has been widely discussed and implemented in database systems, version control systems, and asynchronous groupware systems, its potential in real-time groupware systems is largely unexplored. Intention preservation is an important aspect of consistency maintenance in real-time collaborative editing systems, where multiple users cooperate with each other by concurrently editing the same document. The multi-version approach is supposed to be able to preserve individual users’ concurrent conflicting intentions. In this article, we propose a new multi-versioning scheme that can preserve not only concurrent conflicting intentions but also contextual intentions while achieving convergence of the document under editing. By extending an existing multi-versioning scheme to a general one that specifies the conditions for convergence, we decouple the discussion of convergence from that of intention preservation. By constraining the general scheme, we arrive at the novel scheme that guarantees to preserve users’ intentions. The correctness of the scheme has been formally verified. The design of an algorithm for consistent version composition and identification has been discussed in detail.
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    Journal Article
    An Approach to Ensuring Consistency in Peer-to-Peer Real-Time Group Editors
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 17, 2008) Li, Du; Li, Rui
    Real-time group editors allow distributed users to edit a shared document at the same time over a computer network. Operational transformation (OT) is a well accepted consistency control method in state-of-the-art group editors. Significant progress has been made in this field but there are still many open issues and research opportunities. In particular, established theoretic OT frameworks all require that OT algorithms be able to converge along arbitrary transformation paths. This property is desirable because group editors that implement such algorithms will not rely on a central component for achieving convergence. However, this has not been achieved in any published work to our knowledge. We analyze the root of this problem and propose a novel state difference based transformation (SDT) approach which ensures convergence in the presence of arbitrary transformation paths. Our approach is based on a novel consistency model that is more explicitly formulated than previously established models for proving correctness. SDT is the first and the only OT algorithm proved to converge in peer-to-peer group editors.
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    Conference Paper
    Caring About Sharing: Couples' Practices in Single User Device Access
    (Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2016) Jacobs, Maia; Cramer, Henriette; Barkhuus, Louise
    Most devices today are developed adhering to a one-user paradigm. Yet within households, couples are often sharing devices and accounts. In this paper we take an in-depth look at sharing practices and preferences of cohabiting couples, and discuss the nuances of existing practices surrounding accounts and devices. We present a qualitative interview and diary study with ten couples, consisting of 20 individual interviews, and individual 8-day diaries. Dichotomous access models do not reflect the sharing practices of our couples; in which intent, access, and utilization all characterized sharing behaviors. We present a detailed description of the intentional and unintentional sharing practices our participants used in their day to day interactions and discuss the different challenges that particularly one type of content pose in terms of issues of privacy. We discuss implications for accounts and devices based on the ways in which content was shared and hidden among collocated couples. We provide a structured account of these sharing practices to inform the design of multi-user settings within future technologies.
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    Text Document
    CEVA: A Tool for Collaborative Video Analysis
    (Proceedings of the 1997 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 1997) Cockburn, Andy; Dale, Tony
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    Journal Article
    Collaborative document annotation using electronic mail
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 3, No. 3-4, 1995) Diaper, Dan; Beer, Martin
    The primary purpose of this paper is to describe an approach to software development, the small scale approach, that is particularly appropriate for groupware that has a target user population that is truly global. Many of the reasons why the small scale approach is appropriate are described. To support the paper's primary purpose, the domain of document annotation in collaborative writing is used to illustrate the requirements of such global groupware. A simulation shows how the proposed software might be used by individuals and how annotations might be automatically combined. The requirements analysis from this leads to a high level program design which is implemented, for illustration, as a PERL program.
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    Journal Article
    Comparative study on the effects of groupware and conventional technologies on the efficiency of collaborative writing
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 3, No. 3-4, 1995) Michailidis, Antonios; Rada, Roy
    In this paper the concept of efficiency in collaborative writing is considered in detail and a definition of efficiency is proposed. The definition of efficiency leads to the development of a research framework that delineates five operational measures of efficiency: (a) writing activities efficiency, (b) coordination efficiency, (c) quality of output, (d) absence of breakdowns, and (e) satisfaction with group performance. A comparative study is subsequently presented on the effects that groupware and conventional technologies have on the effciency of collaborative writing. The hypothesis is advanced that groupware can improve the efficiency of collaborative writing over conventional technologies. The results seem to support the hypothesis and indicate that (a) the groupware system examined in this study (MUCH system) offers efficiency benefits in terms of coordination, (b) MUCH users tend to face communication breakdowns while users of conventional technologies tend to face task-related breakdowns, (c) the documents produced with MUCH are of higher content quality, more coherent, and of higher rhetorical effectiveness than the documents produced with conventional technologies, and (d) the comparison of MUCH with conventional technologies shows no significant difference in terms of their effects on group performance satisfaction.
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    Journal Article
    Conventions and Commitments in Distributed CSCW Groups
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 11, 37500) Mark, Gloria
    Conventions are necessary to establish in any recurrentcooperative arrangement. In electronic work, they are importantso as to regulate the use of shared objects. Based on empiricalresults from a long-term study of a group cooperating inelectronic work, I present examples showing that the group failedto develop normative convention behavior. These difficulties informing conventions can be attributed to a long list of factors:the lack of clear precedents, different perspectives among groupmembers, a flexible cooperation media, limited communication, thedesign process, and discontinuous cooperation. Further, I arguethat commitments to the conventions were difficult, due to theconventions not reaching an acceptance threshold, uneven payoffs,and weak social influences. The empirical results call for aspecific set of awareness information requirements to promoteactive learning about the group activity in order to support thearticulation of conventions. The requirements focus on the roleof feedback as a powerful mechanism for shaping and learningabout group behavior.
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    Text Document
    Demonstrational Customization of a Shared Whiteboard to Support User-Defined Semantic Relationships among Objects
    (Proceedings of the 2001 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2001) Li, Du; Patrao, Jason
    As a promising approach to end-user computing, programming by demonstration (PBD) techniques have been explored by many researchers in single-user applications. This paper investigates how PBD techniques can be used to support end-user customization of groupware tools. In collaborative applications, complex semantic relationships can emerge unanticipatedly among objects (participants, data artifacts, tools, devices, etc.) such as the hierarchical organization of participants, consistency maintenance among different views of the same data, and awareness control. It is important that end users are empowered to customize the groupware application to model and enforce such relationships. We present an active rule based approach to modeling user-defined semantic relationships in collaborative applications and explore a demonstrational approach for end-user customization of collaboration tools to support the definition of those relationships. The presented work is based on our work on a shared whiteboard tool, CAB or Collaborative Active whiteBoard. Our approach is being generalized to support end user defined object relationships in shared workspaces.
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    Journal Article
    Deploying and Visualising Teacher’s Scripts of Small Group Activities in a Multi-surface Classroom Ecology: a Study in-the-wild
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 24, No. 2-3, 42156) Martinez-Maldonado, Roberto; Clayphan, Andrew; Kay, Judy
    There is a fast growing interest in the use of interactive surfaces in collaborative learning contexts. These devices hold the promise to enrich a typical collocated class by enabling learners to interact with digital content while maintaining face-to-face mutual awareness. However, little has been done to help teachers deploy and monitor the learning scripts for their planned small group activities in a classroom enhanced with these kinds of devices. We present an approach for deploying and visualising the teacher’s script for small group idea generation and problem solving activities in a multi-surface classroom ecology that is composed of multiple interactive tabletops, public vertical displays and a teacher’s dashboard. We frame our study by drawing on design guidelines for classrooms with multiple interactive surfaces and combine these with principles of scripting and orchestration of learning activities. The paper presents the results and experiences of the implementation of our approach, in an authentic deployment of our classroom ecology, held over 8 weeks in a semester, involving 150 university students and 4 teachers. The paper concludes with remarks about the strengths and shortcomings of our approach, to be taken into account by learning practitioners and designers.
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    Journal Article
    Empirical Study on Collaborative Writing: What Do Co-authors Do, Use, and Like?
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 13, No. 1, 38047) Noël, Sylvie; Robert, Jean-Marc
    How do people work when they are collaborating to write a document? What kind of tools do they use and, in particular, do they resort to groupware for this task? Forty-one people filled out a questionnaire placed on the World Wide Web. In spite of the existence of specialized collaborative writing tools, most respondents reported using individual word processors and email as their main tools for writing joint documents. Respondents noted the importance of functions such as change tracking, version control, and synchronous work for collaborative writing tools. This study also confirmed the great variability that exists between collaborative writing projects, whether it be group membership, management, writing strategy, or scheduling issues.
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    Text Document
    Exploration Environments: Concept and Empirical Evaluation
    (Proceedings of the 2001 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2001) Wulf, Volker; Golombek, Björn
    Exploration environments support users to learn groupware in a self-directed way. They allow users to perceive the way a groupware function works by simulating the impacts of the function's execution on other users' interfaces. This paper motivates and describes the concept of exploration environments and presents an exemplary implementation. Moreover, it reports about the results of an experimental study, which evaluated the effects of this concept on users' learning. The results of this study are discussed and compared to findings from a field study which evaluated the concept, as well.
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    Journal Article
    Formality Considered Harmful: Experiences, Emerging Themes, and Directions on the Use of Formal Representations in Interactive Systems
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 8, No. 4, 36495) Shipman, Frank M.; Marshall, Catherine C.
    This paper reflects on experiences designing, developing, and working with users of a variety of interactive computer systems. The authors propose, based on these experiences, that the cause of a number of unexpected difficulties in human-computer interaction lies in users' unwillingness or inability to make structure, content, or procedures explicit. Besides recounting experiences with system use, this paper discusses why users reject or circumvent formalisms which require such explicit expression, and suggests how system designers can anticipate and compensate for problems users have in making implicit aspects of their tasks explicit. The authors propose computational approaches that address this problem, including incremental and system-assisted formalization mechanisms and methods for recognizing and using undeclared structure; they also propose non-computational solutions that involve designers and users reaching a shared understanding of the task situation and the methods that motivate the formalisms. This paper poses that, while it is impossible to remove all formalisms from computing systems, system designers need to match the level of formal expression entailed with the goals and situation of the users -- a design criteria not commonly mentioned in current interface design.
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    Fostering Interdepartmental Knowledge Communication through Groupware: A Process Improvement Perspective
    (Proceedings of the 1997 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 1997) Kock, Ned
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    Journal Article
    Groupware Environments as Action Constitutive Resources: A Social Action Framework for Analyzing Groupware Technologies
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 6, No. 1, 35490) Ngwenyama, Ojelanki K.; Lyytinen, Kalle J.
    Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is a relatively new and dynamic field dealing with the development and use of groupware technologies in organizations. Several frameworks and models have been proposed for studying CSCW, each conveying a different perspective and theoretical basis. Although these frameworks have contributed much to our understanding of the field, they can be criticized for a lack of holistic understanding of the complex social activity that is constitutive of groupwork. This often leads to the failure of otherwise well designed CSCW applications. In this paper we take up this challenge and propose a social action framework for analyzing groupware technologies. The framework is based on Habermas's theory of social action and four action categories, and the idea that groupware applications serve as sets of rules and resources which mediate group interactions. We demonstrate the value of the framework by analyzing a wide range of existing groupware technologies for their appropriateness to specific groupwork situations in terms of their espoused or implicit assumptions of groupwork, and the action constitutive resources they provide. Our analysis points out that a host of current groupware applications can be fairly easily classified and examined by the way they are configured to support different types of social action. It also suggests that, when implementing groupware applications, developers should critically evaluate: (a) the need for supporting a rich variety of action types, (b) the possible role of computer support in the specific groupwork situations, and (c) the underlying assumptions of groupwork embedded in the groupware platform. Finally, we will discuss how the framework can inform future research and development in the field.
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    Journal Article
    Information needs in technical work settings and their implications for the design of computer tools
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 5, No. 1, 35125) Paepcke, Andreas
    We interviewed information workers in multiple technical areas of a large, diverse company, and we describe some of the unsatisfied information needs we observed during our study. Two clusters of issues are described. The first covers how loosely coupled work groups use and share information. We show the need to structure information for multiple, partly unanticipated uses. We show how the construction of information compounds helps users accomplish some of this restructuring, and we explain how structuring flexibility is also required because of temperamental differences among users. The second cluster of issues revolves around collections of tightly coupled work groups. We show that information shared within such groups differs from information shared across group boundaries. We present the barriers to sharing which we saw operating both within groups and outside, and we explain the function of resource and contact broker which evolved in the settings we examined. For each of these issues we propose implications for information tool design.
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    Integrating 2D and 3D Views for Spatial Collaboration
    (Proceedings of the 2005 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2005) Schafer, Wendy A.; Bowman, Doug A.
    Spatial collaboration is a specialized form of collaboration where the discussion relates to a physical space. This work investigates how to support distributed spatial collaboration activities. It presents a novel prototype that integrates both two-dimensional and three-dimensional representations. This collaborative software is examined in a qualitative study as a group virtually rearranges their lab furniture. The results describe the group's collaboration and their use of the combined representations. The findings highlight the usefulness of multiple representations and the need for additional features to support collaboration across representations.
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    A Landmark-Based Transformation Approach to Concurrency Control in Group Editors
    (Proceedings of the 2005 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2005) Li, Rui; Li, Du
    Operational transformation (OT) is a responsive and nonblocking concurrency control method widely-accepted in group editors. Correctness and performance are the basis of usefulness and usability of OT-based group editors. However, the correctness of previous OT algorithms depends on conditions that are very difficult to verify. In this paper we propose a novel landmark-based transformation (LBT) approach, its correctness no longer depending on those conditions and thus easy to prove. In addition, we give an example algorithm that significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art OT algorithm. This work reveals a more practical approach to developing OT algorithms.
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    “Let's See Your Search-Tool!”—Collaborative Use of Tailored Artifacts in Groupware
    (Proceedings of the 1999 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 1999) Wulf, Volker
    Groupware applications should be tailorable to fit the requirements of dynamically evolving and differentiated fields of application. To encourage individual and collaborative tailoring activities, applications should be tailorable on different levels of complexity. A search tool has been developed which offers different levels of tailoring complexity by means of hierarchically organized component languages. Users can create alternative search tools and compound components by themselves. Search tool alternatives and compound components can also be shared among the users. When introducing this tool into an organization of the political administration, it turned out that the users had considerable problems in understanding the functioning of artifacts created by someone else. To ease cooperative tailoring activities, we have implemented features, which allow users to structure, describe, and explore shared components and search tool alternatives. Also we provided means to store and exchange examples for components' use.
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    Merging Multiple Perspectives in Groupware Use: Intra- and Intergroup Conventions
    (Proceedings of the 1997 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 1997) Mark, Gloria