Over the last 10 years, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has identified a base set of findings. These findings are taken almost as assumptions within the field. In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as information transfer, roles, and policies need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized. However, current systems cannot fully support the social world uncovered by these findings. This paper argues that there is an inherent gap between the social requirements of CSCW and its technical mechanisms. The social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefully ameliorating this social-technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for HCI. Indeed, merely attesting the continued centrality of this gap could be one of the important intellectual contributions of CSCW. This paper also argues that the challenge of the social-technical gap creates an opportunity to refocus CSCW as a Simonian science of the artificial. To be published in Human-Computer Interaction Preprint- Ackerman- Challenge of CSCW 1 1.

Video media spaces are an excellent crucible for the study of privacy. Their design affords opportunities for misuse, prompts ethical questions, and engenders grave concerns from both users and nonusers. Despite considerable discussion of the privacy problems uncovered in prior work, questions remain as to how to design a privacy-preserving video media space and how to evaluate its effect on privacy. The problem is more deeply rooted than this, however. Privacy is an enormous concept from which a large vocabulary of terms emerges. Disambiguating the meanings of and relationships between these terms facilitates understanding of the link between privacy and design. In this article, we draw from resources in environmental psychology and computersupported cooperative work (CSCW) to build a broadly and deeply rooted vocabulary for privacy. We relate the vocabulary back to the real and hard problem of designing privacy-preserving video media spaces. In doing so, we facilitate analysis of the privacy-design relationship.

We propose an approach to creating shared mixed realities based on the construction of transparent boundaries between real and virtual spaces. First, we introduce a taxonomy that classifies current approaches to shared spaces according to the three dimensions of transportation, artificiality and spatiality. Second, we discuss our experience of staging a poetry performance simultaneously within real and virtual theatres. This demonstrates the complexities involved in establishing social interaction between real and virtual spaces and motivates the development of a systematic approach to mixing realities. Third, we introduce and demonstrate the technique of mixed reality boundaries as a way of joining real and virtual spaces together in order to address some of these problems.

The development of tools to support synchronous communications between non-collocated colleagues has received considerable attention in recent years. Much of the work has focused on increasing a sense of co-presence between interlocutors by supporting aspects of face-to-face conversations that go beyond mere words (e.g. gaze, postural shifts). In this regard, a design goal for many environments is the provision of as much media-richness as possible to support non-collocated communication. In this paper we present results from our most recent interviews studying the use of a text-based virtual environment to support work collaborations. We describe how such an environment, though lacking almost all the visual and auditory cues known to be important in face-to-face conversation, has played an important role in day-to-day communication. We offer a set of characteristics we feel are important to the success of this text-only tool and discuss issues emerging from its long-term use. Keyword...

The Community Bar is groupware supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small social worlds: a group of people with a common purpose. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by the Focus/Nimbus model of awareness. Design nuances are strongly influenced by observations and feedback supplied by a community who had been using both the Community Bar and its Notification Collage predecessor for a total of five years. As a consequence, Community Bar’s design supports how communities of ad-hoc and long-standing groups are built and sustained within multiple locales: places that offer a group the site and means for maintaining awareness of one another and for rapidly moving into interaction. This includes a person’s lightweight management of his or her membership in multiple locales, as well as ones varying engagement with the people and artefacts within them.

: COVEN (COllaborative Virtual ENvironments) is a European project that seeks to develop a comprehensive approach to the issues in the development of Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) technology; COVEN brings together twelve academic and industrial partners with a wide range of expertise in CSCW, networked VR, computer graphics, human factors, HCI and telecommunications infrastructures. After two years of work, we are presenting the main features of our approach and results: our driving applications, the main components of our technical investigations, and our experimental activities. With different citizen and professional application scenarios as driving forces, COVEN is exploring the requirements and supporting techniques for collaborative interaction in scalable CVEs. Technical results are being integrated in an enriched networked VR platform based on the dVS and DIVE systems. Taking advantage of a dedicated Europe-wide ISDN and ATM network infrastructure, a large component o...

At a very early stage in the course of CSCW, it became evident that categories such as ‘conversation ’ or ‘workflow ’ were quite insufficient for characterizing and understanding the ways in which cooperative work is coordinated and integrated. It quickly became obvious that cooperating actors somehow, while doing their individual bits, take heed of the context of their joint effort. More specifically, the early harvest of ethnographic field studies in CSCW (e.g., Harper et al., 1989b; Harper et al., 1989a; Heath and Luff, 1991) indicated that cooperating actors align and integrate their activities with those of their colleagues in a seemingly ‘seamless’ manner, that is, without interrupting each other, for instance by asking, suggesting, requesting, ordering, reminding, etc. others of this or that. As a placeholder for these elusive practices of taking heed of what is going on in the setting which seem to play a key role in cooperative work, the term ‘awareness ’ was soon adopted. Not surprisingly then, the concept of ‘awareness ’ has come to play a central role in CSCW, and from the very beginning CSCW researchers have been exploring how computer-based technologies might facilitate some kind of ‘awareness ’ among

With the rapid growth of personal computer networks and the Internet, sharing files has become a central activity in computer use. The ways in which users control the what, how, and with whom of sharing are dictated by the tools they use for sharing; there are a wide range of sharing practices, and hence a wide range of tools to support these practices. In practice, users ’ requirements for certain sharing features may dictate their choice of tool, even though the other affordances available through that tool may not be an ideal match to the desired manner of sharing. In this paper, we explore users ’ current practices in file sharing and examine the tools used to share files. Based on our findings, we unpack the features and affordances of these tools into a set of dimensions along which sharing tools can be characterized. Then, we present the set of user interface features we have prototyped in an interface called a sharing palette, which provides a platform for exploration and experimentation with new modalities of sharing. We briefly present the tool as a whole and then focus on the individual features of the sharing palette that support reported styles of sharing. ACM Classification: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and

System (MMASS). The MMASS allows tha description of situated agents that is, agents sensitive to the spatial relationships that determine constraints and abilities for actions as well as privileged cooperation relationships. The main feature of the MMASS model is to give an explicit definition of the spatial structure of the environment in which the system of situated agents acts and interacts. Agent environment, possibly multilayered, can reproduce a physical space. It is nevertheless possible to define a ‘virtual space’ that agents can roam and where they interact. Interactions take place when two or more agents are brought into dynamic spatial relationship through a set of reciprocal actions, and have an influence on the future behavior of the agents. There are several application domains that require the representation of the space in order to take advantage in the multi–agent approach. Typical examples of these domains are the Multi–Agent Based Simulation (MABS) and the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Two specific problems of these domains will be used in the paper to illustrate the MMASS model.

After eleven years, CSCW is a well recognized research field which has generated, among other things, some new theoretical findings on work practices and cooperation and some new systems that are successfully applied by several organizations. The evaluation of successful applications from the point of view of the above recalled CSCW theories indicates some requirements (openness, continuity, contextualization and language-action integration) that the new generation of CSCW systems should satisfy. The prototype of the MILANO system is a working example of how those requirements can be met and of the challenges a full development of the CSCW potential poses to system designers and developers.