Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

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Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

• Thinking about groups, collaboration, and
  communication

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Project Part 3

• See me if you need resources for your evaluation
• Room, equipment, etc.
• Presentation
• In-class on Dec. 4
• 15 minutes total hard limit
• Formal and professional
• Upload slides on Wiki

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Presentation

• Parts
• Motivation
• Requirements
• learning from users
• Design
• learning from prototyping
• Evaluation
• Conclusions
• QA
• Include all parts, but focus on evaluation in
  particular

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CSCW

• Study of how people work together and how
  technology affects this
• Support the social processes of work, often among
  geographically separated people
• HCI so far CSCW
• Individual use ?
• Psychology ?

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Examples

• The system becomes the moderator between people
• There are now many collaborations, like
• Scientists collaborating on a technical issue
• Authors editing a document together
• Programmers debugging a system concurrently
• Workers collaborating over a shared video
  conferencing application
• Buyers and sellers meeting on eBay

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CS C W?

• The Second C
• Group work not always cooperative or
  collaborative
• The W
• Not just about work anymore
• Support the social processes of a group of people
  communicating or collaborating on anything

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Examples

• Awareness of people in your family, community,
  physical space...
• Mobile communication
• Online discussions, blogs
• Sharing photos, stories, experiences
• Recommender systems
• Playing games

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Groupware

• Software specifically designed
• to support group working or playing
• with cooperative requirements in mind
• NOT just tools for communication
• Groupware can be classified by
• when and where the participants are working
• the function it performs for cooperative work
• Specific and difficult problems with groupware
  implementation and evaluation

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The Time/Space Matrix

• Classify groupware by
• when the participants are working, at the same
  time or not
• where the participants are working, at the same
  place or not
• Common names for axes time synchronous/asynch
  ronous place co-located/remote

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Applied to traditional technology
differenttime
sametime
face-to-faceconversation, whiteboard
sameplace
post-it note
differentplace
phone call
letter
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Applied to computer technology
Time
Synchronous
Asynchronous
Co-located
Place
Remote
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A More-fleshed Out Taxonomy
A typical space/time matrix (after Baecker,
Grudin, Buxton, Greenberg, 1995, p.742)
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Styles of Groupware Systems

• Computer-mediated communication
• Meeting and decision support systems
• Shared applications and tools

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Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) Aids

• Examples
• Email, Chat, virtual worlds
• Desktop videoconferencing -- Examples
• CUSee-Me
• MS NetMeeting
• SGI InPerson
• Video/Audio chat

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CMC applications

• Support a wide range of communication needs
• Allow large number of people to quickly and
  easily communicate
• Can be combined with other activities and systems
• Lead to many new social conventions and issues

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Social implications

• Less rich channels fewer details, higher
  likelihood of misunderstanding
• More anonymous
• More autonomy, more ability to control message
• Can be less intrusive
• Ill IM you before I stop by your office

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Food for thought

• Why arent videophones more popular?
• How and when do you use Instant Messaging? How
  does this differ from email?
• What communication technology do you still want?

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Meeting and Decision Support Systems

• Examples
• Corporate decision-support conference room
• Provides ways of rationalizing decisions, voting,
  presenting cases, etc.
• Concurrency control is important
• Shared computer classroom/cluster
• Group discussion/design aid tools

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Shared Applications and Tools

• Shared editors, design tools, etc.
• Want to avoid locking and allow multiple people
  to concurrently work on document
• Requires some form of contention resolution
• How do you show what others are doing?

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Social Issues

• People bring in different perspectives and views
  to a collaboration environment
• Goal of CSCW systems is often to establish some
  common ground and to facilitate understanding and
  interaction

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Turn Taking

• There are many subtle social conventions about
  turn taking in an interaction
• Personal space, closeness
• Eye contact
• Gestures
• Body language
• Conversation cues
• How is turn taking handled in IM?

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Geography, Position

• In group dynamics, the physical layout of
  individuals matters a lot
• Power positions
• How can you tell power in a videoconference?

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Awareness

• What is happening?
• Who is there? e.g. IM buddy list
• What has happened and why?
• How do you use awareness in IM?
• What other systems have awareness?

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Groupware implementation

• Often more complicated
• feedback and network delays
• architectures for groupware
• feedthrough and network traffic
• robustness and scaling

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Feedback and network delays

• At least 2 network messages four context
  switches
• With protocols 4 or more network messages

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Types of architecture

• centralized single copy of application and data
• client-server simplest case
• master-slave special case of client-server
• server merged with one client
• replicated copy on each workstation
• also called peer-to-peer
• local feedback
• race conditions

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Feedthrough traffic

• Need to inform all other clients of changes
• Few networks support broadcast messages, so n
  participants ? n1 network messages!
• Solution increase granularity
• reduce frequency of feedback
• but poor feedthrough ? loss of shared context
• Trade-off timeliness vs. network traffic

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Evaluation

• Evaluating the usability and utility of CSCW
  tools is quite challenging
• Need more participants
• Logistically difficult
• Apples - oranges
• Often use field studies and ethnographic
  evaluations to assist
• Groupware and Social Dynamics Eight Challenges
  for Developers
• By Jonathan Grudin (now at Microsoft)
• http//www.ics.uci.edu/grudin/Papers/CACM94/cacm9
  4.html

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Groupware Challenges (Grudin)

• Who does work vs. who gets benefit
• The system may require extra effort for people
  not really receiving benefit
• Critical mass
• prisoners dilemma
• Need enough people before system is successful

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More Grudin challenges

• Social, political, and motivational factors
• Outside factors can affect system success
• No standard procedures
• Many procedures and exceptions when it comes to
  groups interacting

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More Grudin challenges

• Infrequent features
• How often do we actually use groupware anyway?
• Solution add groupware features to existing
  individual software
• Evaluation is longer, more complicated, less
  precise

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Recommendations

• Add group features to existing apps
• Benefit all group members
• Start with niches were application is highly
  needed
• Consider evaluation and adoption early
• Expect and plan for development and evaluation to
  take longer