This work has been sponsored by NSF grant IRI- 9015443. This project had two primary goals: (a) to build a hypermedia and window system supporting collaboration, (b) to better understand the collaboration process.
To meet the first goal, we developed the Artifact Based Collaboration (ABC) system, [ Jeffay Smith Artifact ] whose major system components include: a distributed, hyper-media file system, called the Distributed Graph Storage System (DGS), virtual screen which supports an ABC workspace including conference rooms (windows), ABC browsers and applications, and the Matrix, a layer of operating system infrastructure that provides generic collaborative functions, such as conferencing and hyperlinking, to all browsers and applications that execute within a virtual screen.
We carried out several studies to meet our second goal.
Four anthropologists conducted a study of three
software development teams over a period of four months.
[
Holland Reeves
]
A second study was carried
out by a graduate student who worked as a participant observer in
one of our project's programming teams over a period of twelve
weeks.
[
Kupstas Patterns
]
A third comprised in-depth interviews with members of an
established research group, one that had been working together for
a number of years.
[
Lansman Smith
]
A fourth study analyzed the ways in which
a group constructs a body of shared knowledge to underly and
support its work.
Our studies have contributed to a general theory of computer-
mediated collaboration under the concept of Collective Intelligence .
[
Smith Collective
]