We are investigating ways in which media space technologies can support distributed work groups through access to information that supports general awareness. Awareness involves knowing who is “around”, what activities are occurring, who is talking with whom; it provides a view of one another in the daily work environments. Awareness may lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the development of shared cultures—all important aspects of maintaining working relationships which are denied to groups distributed across multiple sites. The Portholes project, at Rank Xerox EuroPARC in

A ubiquitous wearable computing infrastructure is now firmly entrenched within organizations across the globe, yet much of its potential remains untapped. This paper describes how the handheld computers and mobile phones in today's organizations can be used to quantify face-to-face interactions and to infer aspects about a user's situation, enabling more creative and transparent functioning of human organizations.

Abstract. The exploration of social networks is essential to find capable cooperators who can help problem-solving and to augment cooperation between workers in an organization. This paper describes PeCo-Mediator-II to seek for capable cooperators throuth a chain of personal connections (PeCo) in a networked organization. Moreover, this system helps to gather, explore, and visualize social networks in an organization. The experimental results show that the system facilitates users ’ encounters with cooperators and develops new helpful connections with the cooperators. Key words: Personal connections, on-line social networks, collaborative help networks, mediation, and software agents. Abbreviations: PeCo – Personal Connection 1.

Handwritten codexes or printed books transformed society by allowing users to preserve and transmit information. Today, leather-bound volumes and illuminated manuscripts are giving way to animated image maps and hot links. Vannevar Bush's memex has inspired the World Wide Web, which provides users with vast information resources and convenient communications. In looking to the future, we might again transform society by building genexes -- generators of excellence. Such inspirational environments would empower personal and collaborative creativity by enabling users to: . collect information from an existing domain of knowledge, . create innovations using advanced tools, . consult with peers or mentors in the field, and then . disseminate the results widely. This paper describes how a framework for an integrated set of software tools might support this four-phase model of creativity in science, medicine, the arts, and beyond. Current initiatives are positive and encouraging, but the...

The exploration of social networks is essential to find capable collaborators who can help problem-solving and to augment cooperation between users. This paper describes PeCo-Mediator-II for seeking for a collaborator with the chain of personal connections (PeCo) in distributed organizations. Moreover, this system helps gathering, exploring, and visualizing social networks. The experimental results show that the system facilitates that learners encounter collaborators and develop a new helpful relationship beyond the classroom. Keywords: Collaborative learning, personal connections, on-line social networks, collaborative help networks, mediation, and software agents.

Information retrieval is generally considered an individual activity, and information retrieval research and tools reflect this view. As digitally mediated communication and information sharing increase, collaborative information retrieval merits greater attention and support. We describe field studies of information gathering in two design teams that had very different products, disciplinary backgrounds, and tools. We found striking similarities in the kinds of information they sought and the methods used to get it. For example, each team sought information about design constraints from external sources. A common strategy was to propose ideas and request feedback, rather than to ask directly for recommendations. Some differences in information seeking and sharing reflected differences in work contexts. Our findings suggest some ways that existing team collaboration tools could support collaborative information retrieval more effectively.

The principle of partitioning tasks among product development teams so as to minimize the cost of interactions across design teams is an important characteristic of complex engineered systems. Although there is growing literature that deals with the proper organization of product development tasks, little attention is given to rigorous modeling of the phenomena. To fill the void, we present a mathematical formulation for the problem. Two main issues are addressed by the model: 1) how to specify task dependencies, and 2) how to optimally partition the tasks among a number of teams. Characteristics of the problem are analyzed, and an efficient solution procedure is proposed. The developed model and solution technique can be applied to various scales of the product design and development process, and may open a variety of interesting questions.

Abstract: Many organisations are currently forced to collaborate with others in renewing their products and processes to stay competitive, to enter new or to retain their current markets, or to get easy access to new knowledge. Management of collaboration between two or more organisations is, however, still not well understood, given that about half of the collaborative endeavours fail. A methodology to support management of collaboration is still lacking. To build such a methodology, knowledge is needed on the process of collaboration. Much research has been devoted, however, to understanding the relationships between initial conditions and outcomes of a collaboration initiative. The results of this research are sometimes contradicting or not very well comparable because of differences in conceptualisation or ignorance of moderating factors. Moreover, a good design of initial conditions is necessary, but not sufficient. Conditions change during the process of collaboration. We need knowledge on the dynamics of the collaboration process to understand why and how conditions change and how they can be influenced. In this paper an approach will be presented that can support the gradual building of knowledge on the process of collaboration. The approach, which resulted from the Esprit IV project 23286 FREE (Fast Reactive Extended Enterprise), can be viewed as a first step towards building a methodology to support management of collaboration. The concept of infrastructures for collaboration will be introduced stressing the integral nature of management of collaboration.

"Software engineering" was introduced as a model for the field of software development in 1968. This paper, reconsidering that model in the light of four decades of experience, finds it lacking in its ability to explain project success and failures, predict important issues in running projects, and help practitioners formulate effective strategies on the fly. An alternative underlying model for software development is presented: Software development as a series of resource-limited, goal-directed cooperative games of invention and communication. The primary goal of each game is the production and deployment of a software system; the residue of the game is a set of markers to assist the players of the next game. People use markers and props to remind, inspire and inform each other in getting to the next move in the game. The next game is an alteration of the system or the creation of a neighboring system. Each game therefore has as a secondary goal to create an advantageous position for the next game. Since each game is resource-limited, the primary and secondary goals compete for resources. The cooperativegame model provides the benefits that the software engineering model misses: It raises to the proper priority level issues crucial to successful software projects; it explains how teams with messy-looking processes sometimes outperform others with tidier processes; and it helps busy practitioners decide how to respond to unexpected situations. Finally, it is seen that much of engineering in the general belongs in the category of resource-limited, cooperative games.

In this paper we present an overview of the field of distributed development of software systems and applications (DD). Based on an analysis of the published literature, we consider threats to communication, coordination and control in DD caused by Temporal Distance, Geographical Distance, and Socio-Cultural Distance. The analysis results in a more complete framework for reasoning in the DD domain which should be a useful resource for both academic researchers and practitioners. 1.