In this paper, we describe the influence of physical proximity on the development of collaborative relationships between scientific researchers and on the execution of their work. Our evidence is drawn from our own studies of scientific collaborators, as well as from observations of research and development activities collected by other investigators. These descriptions provide the foundation for a discussion of the actual and potential role of communications technology in professional work, especially for collaborations carried out at a distance.

This chapter analyzes why computers and telecommunications have not created computcr-mediated work environments for collaboration that are as successful as physically shared environments. Our goals are, first, to identify the mechanisms by which proxin~ity makes cnl-laboration easier, concentrating on the way it facilitates interpersollal interaction and aware-ness; and second, to evaluate how current computer-mediated communication technologies provide or fail to provide the key benefits of proximity. We use a decompositional frame-work that examines how visibility, copresence, mobility, cotemporalitv and other affordances of media affect the important collaborative tasks of initiating conversation, establishing common ground, and maintaining awareness of potentially relevant changcs in the collabo-rative environment. Increasingly, collaborating with other people is as likely to take place over distance or time as it is face-to-face. An abundance of new communication technologies has been dcvcloped to mediate remote collaboration: e-mail, bulletin boards, instant messaging, document sharing, videoconferencing, awareness services, and others. Yet collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than

coordination. This paper uses a variety of data from R & D organizations to describe informal communication and its functions in organizations. It argues that informal communication, generally mediated by physical proximity, is crucial for coordination to occur. Informal communication is frequent in R&D organizations, it aids organizational members in learning about each other and their work, it supports both production work and the social relations that underlie it, and it provides a critical facility that collaborators rely on to start joint work, maintain it, and drive it to conclusion. Without informal communication, many collaborations would undoubtedly not occur and others would break up before becoming successful. In this light we present two telecommunication systems designed to support informal communication through artificial proximity. The VideoWindow system is a wide-screen video teleconferencing system continuously linking public places, and Cruiser is a switched, desk-top video communications system that implements a metaphor of a virtual hallway. Both systems have the potential to support informal communication, but experience with the VideoWindow and analysis of Cruiser suggest that careful attention to implementation detail will determine if they are successful. Informal Communication in Organizations: Form, Function, and Technology Most of the work that people do in organizations requires some degree of active cooperation and communication with others. This is true of routine clerical work, it is equally true of creative work, like scientific research or engineering development. Indeed, in some scientific fields over 65% of publications are jointly authored (Over, 1982), and most research projects, regardless of authorship, require support staffs of cl...

This paper is concerned with modeling the nature of expertise and its role in society in relation to research on expert systems and enterprise models. It argues for the adoption of a collective stance in which the human species is viewed as a single organism recursively partitioned in space and time into sub-organisms that are similar to the whole. These parts include societies, organizations, groups, individuals, roles, and neurological functions. Notions of expertise arise because the organism adapts as a whole through adaptation of its interacting parts. The phenomena of expertise correspond to those leading to distribution of tasks and functional differentiation of the parts. The mechanism is one of positive feedback from parts of the organism allocating resources for action to other parts on the basis of those latter parts past performance of similar activities. Distribution and differentiation follow if performance is rewarded, and low performers of tasks, being excluded by the f...

The contemporary structure of scientific activity, including the publication of papers in academic journals, citation behaviour, the clustering of research into specialties and so on has been intensively studied over the last fifty years. A number of quantitative relationships between aspects of the system have been observed. This paper reports on a simulation designed to see whether it is possible to reproduce the form of these observed relationships using a small number of simple assumptions. The simulation succeeds in generating a specialty structure with 'areas' of science displaying growth and decline. It also reproduces Lotka's Law concerning the distribution of citations among authors. The simulation suggests that it is possible to generate many of the quantitative features of the present structure of science and that one way of looking at scientific activity is as a system in which scientific papers generate further papers, with authors (scientists) playing a necessary but incidental role. The theoretical implications of these suggestions are briefly explored.

Though one wouldn’t know it from the experience of students in high school, the practice of science takes place in a rich social context which is shaped by an increasing amount of communication and collaboration (Kraut, Egido and Galegher, 1990). While high school students ’ experience of science consists in large part of performing carefullyscripted

A model of knowledge-acquisition for knowledge-based systems is developed which presents the acquisition activity as playing an essential and continuous role in skilled performance, rather than as a separate and separable activity. The practical implications of this model for systems design are developed, and recommendations made targeted on monitoring the quality of advice from expert systems and achieving closer integration between the application of these systems and the formation of expertise. The model is developed in depth to generate taxonomies of human knowledge processes and use these to analyze the roles of a wide variety of computerbased systems in supporting these processes. The model is used to highlight strengths and weaknesses in the current state of the art in knowledge representation. This paper provides an overall framework for the variety of knowledge acquisition problems, techniques and technologies discussed in the literature. 1 Introduction One of the most inter...

This paper analyzes the role of Internet Discussion Groups in informal academic communication. It examines the claims in the literature that there are general benefits of academic mailing lists and newsgroups for researchers. Different hypotheses relating to potential contact and information benefits are tested with data of a random sample of English and Dutch university researchers within the humanities, the social and natural sciences. The outcomes support hypotheses about a few information effects and, more often, contact benefits of Internet Discussion Groups. Researchers build up weak contacts that make their research more visible and that make them more aware of other researchers“ work. These weak contacts are useful for the reception of new research papers. As a result, Internet Discussion Groups provide access to social capital. However, contrary to what is stated in the literature, the data shows no evidence for expectations about equalizing effects on the general structure of academic communication. Internet Discussion Groups do not reduce inequalities in the opportunities to use informal communication channels. * The research project was conducted while the author was a Ph.D. student at the Interuniversity Center

Experts may be modeled as managing the inductive dynamics of knowledge acquisition in the knowledge processes of society. Who becomes an expert may be modeled as a random process under the influence of strong positive feedback loops in the social mechanisms giving access to knowledge. These models have implications for the design of expert systems.

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