ComputerSupported Cooperative Work CSCW

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Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

• Thinking about groups

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Agenda

• Questions
• Project Part 4
• CSCW
• classification
• Groupware
• Monday
• Implementation and evaluation challenges
• Read Grudins challenges

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Part 4

• Conduct Evaluation
• Report results
• Provide analysis
• Implications on design
• Reflections on evaluation plan

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Presentation

• 15 minutes each (including questions)
• Load slides onto swiki
• Motivation
• Requirements
• learning from users
• Design
• learning from prototyping
• possible demo
• Evaluation
• Conclusions
• QA

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CSCW

• Computer Supported Cooperative Work
• HCI connotations CSCW
• individual use
• psychology

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CSCW

• Computer Supported Cooperative Work
• Study of how people work together as a group and
  how technology affects this
• Support the social processes of work, often among
  geographically separated people

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Examples

• Recall multitasking paradigm shift
• The system became the medium, the moderator,
  rather than just a tool
• 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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The second C

• Group work not always cooperative or collaborative

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Other resources

• see Web

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Groupware

• Software specifically designed
• to support group working
• 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

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6750 groupware projects
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Classifying Groupware

• Time/Space matrix
• When and where the participants are working
• People-Artifact Framework
• The function it performs for cooperative work

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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
sameplace
face-to-faceconversation
post-it note
differentplace
letter
phone call
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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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Classification by Function

• Cooperative work involves
• Participants who are working
• Artefacts upon which they work

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What interactions does a tool support?
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Communication via an artifact

• Deixis
• reference to work objects
• Feedthrough
• communication through the artefact

understanding
direct
communication
deixis
control andfeedback
A
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Many aspects of communication

• Good groupware open to all aspects of
  cooperation
• e.g., annotations in co-authoring systems
• embedding direct communication
• bar codes / RF ID
• form of deixis
• aids diffuse large scale cooperation

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awareness
who is there

• what is happening?
• who is there e.g. IM buddy list
• what has happened and why?

what hashappened
A
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Groupware implementation

• Often more complicated
• feedback and network delays
• architectures for groupware
• feedthrough and network traffic
• toolkits, 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

• centralised single copy of application and data
• client-server simplest case
• N.B. opposite of X windows client/server
• master-slave special case of client-server
• N.B. server merged with one client
• replicated copy on each workstation
• also called peer-peer
• local feedback
• race conditions

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Client-server architecture

user 1
user 2
user n
client 1
client 2
client n

server
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Shared window architecture

• Non-collaboration aware applications ?
  client/server approachcorresponding feedback
  problems
• no functionality in the groupware but must
  handle floor control
• example shared X
• single copy of real application
• user stub for each user acts as an X application
  (X client)
• one application stub acts like X server for real
  application
• user stub passes events to single application
  stub
• stubs merge X events coming inand replicate X
  lib calls going out (strictly protocol)

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Shared X
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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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Evaluating Groupware

• Its harder!
• see web, particularly Grudin article and
  Usability 1st resource page.

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Groupware Challenges (Grudin)

• Who does work vs. who gets benefit
• Critical mass
• prisoners dilemma

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More Grudin challenges

• Social, political, and motivational factors
• No standard procedures

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More Grudin challenges

• Infrequent features
• Groupware intuition

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More Grudin challenges

• Managing acceptance
• Evaluation
• longer, more complicated, less precise

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More on CSCW

• CS 7460 Collaborative Computing