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Collaborative applications enable Computer Supported Cooperative
Work (CSCW).
Why provide computer support for collaboration when people have been
working together for ages without the computer?
- Being There:
Computer tools can simulate face-to-face meetings among
distributed users,
giving them the illusion of ''being there'' [].
For instance a video-conferencing and
whiteboard application can together simulate a face-to-face
meeting conducted using a physical whitebaord.
Today, this is considered perhaps the biggest motivation for CSCW.
- Beyond Being There:
If all collaborative applications did was simulate ''being there,''
then they would always support meetings that are inferior to the real
face-to-face meetings,
and thus be considered necessary evils by users
who cannot be physically colocated.
In fact,
these applications can allow us to
go ``beyond being there,''
offering benefits we cannot get in meetings supported without the computer.
We can
have available to us all the resources in our local environment,
be in several meetings at the same time,
form subgroups without disturbing others,
comment and vote with anonymity,
be automatically forced to follow meeting protocols,
rely on the computer to keep a log of the meeting and save state information,
and do our private work when an item being discussed is not of interest to us.
Hollan and Scott
[]
argue that collaborative applications
will not be truly successful unless
people use them to collaborate with each other even when have the
choice of face-to-face meetings.
For that to happen,
people must prefer the benefits ``beyond being there'' over the drawbacks of
not actually being
in a real face-to-face meeting.
- Sharing of Computer State:
Collaborative application are also necessary to allow users to
view and manipulate information that must be processed
using the computer.
For instance,
a collaborative debugger is necessary to allow
multiple users to jointly debug a program.
Without collaborative applications,
users wishing to jointly manipulate information using the computer
would be forced to
huddle around a workstation,
sharing a single physical set of input and output devices.
This approach,
though currently used for some pairwise collaborations,
is not suitable for collaborations involving larger number of users.
It can be argued that applications that support distributed collaboration
and allow us to go beyond being there
are special cases of applications that allow sharing of computer state.
The main difference is that in the former case
computer support is provided for a collaborative task (such as a software inspection meeting)
done traditionally without the computer and
in the latter case we add collaboration to a computer-supported task (such as debugging)
currently done individually.
While these may be well-argued reasons for CSCW,
they have to be taken with a pinch of salt,
since this area is still at the research stage and collaborative applications
have not yet been deployed and tested extensively.
Thus,
we cannot say,
based on actual usage,
how important these reasons actually are.
We can mainly argue,
based mainly on hypothetical scenarios and lab experience,
about the importance and nature of collaborative applications.
In this respect,
this course will be in the spirit of other advanced graduate courses,
discussing several untested concepts that have not yet made it to the commercial
marketplace.
Nontheless,
there are several trends that indicate
that the potential impact of CSCW would,
in fact,
be great:
-
Some asynchronous groupware tools such as electronic mail, the Web,
and Lotus Notes have gained widespread use. There is a new system called Groove
created by the inventor of Lotus Notes that has many fans
including Microsoft, which has bought a big chunk of the company.
-
Some synchronous tools such as shared whiteboards, chat programs,
videoconferencing systems and shared window systems have
been commercialized by Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle - to name a few
companies.
People are willing to pay by the minute for the services of some these tools -
in particular Webex and Microsoft LiveMeeting.
-
Lab studies of several non-commercialized collaborative applications have
been positive.
-
Surveys claim that much of the time (30-70 percent) of an office worker is spent
in meetings []
and organizations,
specially software companies,
are increasingly getting distributed.
-
Not only have new, popular conferences emerged in this area,
but traditional
conferences in almost every systems area,
including operating systems, database systems,
software engineering,
and user-interface systems,
have special tracks on collaborative systems,
making it currently one of the ''hot'' areas.
-
One can argue that
every tool in the future would be collaborative since
most complex tasks would be computerized and require collaboration.
Thus, every application
would have some state that more than one user may want to see and manipulate.
Can you think of any application that you would not want to share in any situation?
Next: Views of Collaboration
Up: Introduction
Previous: Definition of a
Prasun Dewan
Wed Aug 25 15:24:31 EDT 2004