Computer Supported Collaborative Work

Class Notes: http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jeffery/courses/579/cscw.html
Midterm Exam: scores ranged from 41-96, with many in 70's and 80's. You may pick them up starting Thursday afternoon. 1-2 of you may want to consider dropping the course before the deadline Friday; see Dr. Cook for advising if you are in doubt.

CSCW (sometimes called "groupware") is the field of using computers to assist in the communication and coordination tasks of multi-person projects.

Pfeifer's Overview Pages

This is not Dr. Joe Pfeiffer, this is some person from Canada who has a nice overview of CSCW on his website.

CSCW Conferences

There are two primary research conferences on CSCW, held in alternating years, one in North America (CSCW) and one in Europe (ECSCE). From recent conference papers CSCW can be inferred to span topics such as:

instant messaging, e-mail, chat
group editing of documents or drawings
methods of creating collections and aggregations
virtual environments, telepresence
adding group interactivity to existing applications, eg. web browsers
contact management, scheduling
work styles within distributed groups

E-mail, Chat, IM, newsgroups, WWW

The original CSCW tool, e-mail, is still the heaviest use of the Internet. Many or most of the important CSCW ideas vastly predate the WWW.

Is there any difference between "communication tool" and "computer supported cooperative work tool"?

Notes*, Outlook, UW Calendar

Lotus Notes, Domino, and related products comprise an "integrated collaborative environment", providing messaging, calendaring, scheduling, and an infrastructure for additional organization-specific applications. Providing a single point of access, security, and high-availability for these applications is a Good Thing.

Microsoft Outlook is a ubiquitous scheduling tool for coordinating folks' calenders and setting up meetings.

Many open source calendar applications are out there, but UW Calendar is probably important, because they are my alma mater, and because they seem to deliver major working tools (e.g. pine).

SourceForge

A website providing free service to free software developers

A "collaborative software development platform" consisting of:

collaborative development system web tools: a web interface for project administration; group membership and permissions
web server: hosting documentation as well as source and binary distributions
trackers for providing support: bug tracking, patches, suggestion boxes
mailing lists, discussion forums: web-based administration, archival of messages, etc.
shell service and compile farm: a diverse network of hosts running many operating systems
mysql: for use with the website or the project itself
CVS: a repository for the source code
vhost: virtual hosting (but not DNS) for registered domains
trove: project listsings within a massive databse of open source projects

Collaborative Editors

How do n users edit the same document at the same time? How do they see each other's changes in real-time? How do they merge changes?

Option A (manual): make them all sit in a meeting room, let one person at a time serve as the typist for the group.
Option B (semi-realtime): use CVS, run cvs commit and cvs update a lot. Imagine a text editor in which cvs commit was a single-key operation, and cvs update was performed automatically once every few seconds...
Option C (asynchronous, passing the baton): Microsoft Word lets you turn on change tracking, and then each user's changes are color-coded for later review by others.
Option D (collaborative editor): file is shared by n users in realtime. Each user sees the others. Various architectures (central document, replicated document) and collaboration styles (separate cursors for each user; users sharing a cursor...).

An (unfinished) collaborative editor example: Pegasus

Wikis

Wiki-wiki means quick, so this is a "quickie" CSCW tool

"The simplest online database that could possibly work".
"A composition system, a discussion medium, a repository, a mail system, and a chat room". Writable web pages + MSWord-style change management.
Anyone can edit every page. This has proven to be a management challenge. You can delete anything you want, but others can restore it just as fast.
Any two or more capitalized multi-letter words (WikiWords) is a link. Adding one without a link creates a question mark.

So, do we have a wiki for this class yet, and if not, shall we create one? If we do create one, how will I know when I need to go read it?

Virtual Communities and Collaborative Virtual Environments

A wiki is an example of a virtual community: a persistent on-line space in which people can communicate about topics of interest. Many other forms of text-based virtual communities are out there, including USENET newsgroups, MUDs, and mailing lists.

Another form of virtual community is the collaborative virtual environment . I gave a colloquium talk on this topic recently, and am offering a special topics course next fall on the subject. Compared with a wiki, a collaborative virtual environment is:

a 3D graphical space
a powerful chat engine
a multiuser "virtual reality", perhaps without eyegoggles, datagloves, etc.
a more structured, and possibly more task-oriented, form of community
a supporter of coordinated (usually synchronous) interactions within some domain. The CVE may graphically support activities within this domain, which might have side-effects outside the CVE.

A conference on CVE's has been held several times; I am not sure whether the research community has established independence or remains within CSCW.

Possible domains: games, education, software engineering, ...

Additional CSCW Resources

TU Munich has a bibliography database and a page of links