This research examines a collaborative solution to a common problem, that of providing help to distributed users. The Answer Garden 2 system provides a secondgeneration architecture for organizational and community memory applications. After describing the need for Answer Garden 2’s functionality, we describe the architecture of the system and two underlying systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and Collaborative Refinery. We also present detailed descriptions of the collaborative help and collaborative refining facilities in the Answer Garden 2 system.

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.

Instant Messaging (IM) is being widely adopted by teenagers. In a study of 16 teenage IM users, we explore IM as an emerging feature of teen life, focusing our questions on its support of interpersonal communication and its role and salience in everyday life. We qualitatively describe the teens' IM use interpersonally, as well as its place in the domestic ecology. We also identify technology adoption conditions and discuss behaviors around privacy management. In this initial investigation, we found differences in the nature of use between high school and college teens, differences we propose are accounted for by teens' degree of autonomy as a function of domestic and scholastic obligations, the development of independent work practices, Internet connectivity access, and even transportation access. Moreover, while teen IM use is in part characterized as an optimizing choice between multiple communications media, practice is also tied to concerns around peer pressure, peer group membership and creating additional opportunities to socialize.

To explore the potential of using audio by itself in a shared media system, we studied a workgroup using an audio-only media space. This media space, called Thunderwire, combined high-quality audio with open connections to create a shared space for its users. The two-month field study provided a richly nuanced understanding of this audio space's social use. The system afforded rich sociable interactions. Indeed, within the field study, audio by itself afforded a telepresent environment for its users. However while a usable media space and a useful social space, Thunderwire required its users to adapt to many audio-only conditions. Keywords: Audio, audio spaces, media spaces, electronic social spaces, social presence, speech interactions, mediated communication, computer-mediated communication, CMC, telepresence, social interactions, rich interactions, norms INTRODUCTION Media spaces have existed in increasingly usable and powerful forms for over a decade [2]. As Meyrowitz explains,...

Abstract. One way to gain a principled understanding of computer-mediated communication (CMC) use in the wild is to consider the properties of the communication medium, the usage practices, and the social context in which practices are situated. We describe the adoption and use of a novel, chat-like system called BABBLE. Drawing on interviews and conversation logs from a 6-month field study of six different groups at IBM Corporation (USA), we examine the ways in which the technical properties of the system enable particular types of communicative practices such as waylaying and unobtrusive broadcast. We then consider how these practices influence (positively or negatively) the adoption trajectories of the six deployments.

carl.gutwin, reagan.penner, kevin.schneider @ usask.ca Open-source software development projects are almost always collaborative and distributed. Despite the difficulties imposed by distance, these projects have managed to produce large, complex, and successful systems. However, there is still little known about how open-source teams manage their collaboration. In this paper we look at one aspect of this issue: how distributed developers maintain group awareness. We interviewed developers, read project communication, and looked at project artifacts from three successful open source projects. We found that distributed developers do need to maintain awareness of one another, and that they maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with. Although there are several sources of information, this awareness is maintained primarily through text-based communication (mailing lists and chat systems). These textual channels have several characteristics that help to support the maintenance of awareness, as long as developers are committed to reading the lists and to making their project communication public.

Online spaces that enable shared public interpersonal communications are of significant social, organizational, and economic importance. In this paper, a theoretical model and associated unobtrusive method are proposed for researching the relationship between online spaces and the behavior they host. The model focuses on the collective impact that individual information-overload coping strategies have on the dynamics of open, interactive public online group discourse. Empirical research was undertaken to assess the validity of both the method and the model, based on the analysis of over 2.65 million postings to 600 Usenet newsgroups over a 6-month period. Our findings support the assertion that individual strategies for coping with “information overload” have an observable impact on large-scale online group discourse. Evidence was found for the hypotheses that: (1) users are more likely to respond to simpler messages in overloaded mass interaction; (2) users are more likely to end active participation as the overloading of mass interaction increases; and (3) users are more likely to generate simpler responses as the overloading of mass interaction grows. The theoretical model outlined offers insight into aspects of computer-mediated communication tool usability, technology design, and provides a road map for future empirical research.

Abstract: This paper is based on a study of the ways in which a group negotiated the use of a new mobile technology. The group was made up of ski instructors who, during a one-week ski trip, were equipped with a mobile awareness device called the Hummingbird. The group was studied using ethnomethodologically inspired qualitative methods, with the focus on the group members ’ different views of the Hummingbird’s intended use. Negotiations of use occurred using two methods: talk and action. The users negotiated issues such as where and when to use the technology, and whether to consider the Hummingbird a work tool or a gadget for social events. Further, the empirical results clearly show how negotiations of new, mobile technology differ from stationary technology.

The concept of affordance is popular in the HCI community but not well understood. Donald Norman appropriated the concept of affordances from James J. Gibson for the design of common objects and both implicitly and explicitly adjusted the meaning given by Gibson. There was, however, ambiguity in Norman’s original definition and use of affordances which he has subsequently made efforts to clarify. His definition germinated quickly and through a review of the HCI literature we show that this ambiguity has lead to widely varying uses of the concept. Norman has recently acknowledged the ambiguity, however, important clarifications remain. Using affordances as a basis, we elucidate the role of the designer and the distinction between usefulness and usability. We expand Gibson’s definition into a framework for design.

The problem of finding someone who might be able to help with a particular task or knowledge area exists everywhere, be it in groups of students or corporate settings. Time and effort are spent looking for relevant information when another person in the community could easily provide assistance. We have chosen to tackle this problem. Our approach to addressing the problem of finding people who can help is to use software agents to assist the search for expertise and mediate the information exchange process. Issues of availability, user profiling, privacy and incentives are involved. We chose the Java Programming domain for initial implementation and testing of the system. Other researchers have taken stabs at this problem, most without the use of agent technology. We are building agents, called Expert Finders, to help people find help. Introduction 1 A person may find him/herself in need of help even when performing routine tasks. Very often, help is hard to find. The person ends up ...