Interviews with Volker Wulf and Myriam Lewkowicz on ‘‘The European Tradition of CSCW’’

Abstract

In 2015, BISE featured a special issue on “CSCW & Social Computing”. Whereas the special issue gave a global view of the field, the featured interviews with Jonathan Grudin and Jay Nunamaker were mainly focused on the American perspective on the field.

However, there is a European research tradition which is rather practice based and tries to understand and support cooperation in the real world by means of IT artifacts, in teams, organizations, or communities. This tradition which nowadays spans the whole world is institutionally represented by the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET), which organizes the annual “European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work” (ECSCW), the biannual Conference “Communities & Technologies” (C&T), and is responsible for the Journal on CSCW (JCSCW).

In this issue we want to enrich the material presented in the 2015 special issue with interviews with the current and the future chairs of EUSSET – about the past and the future of the European tradition of CSCW.