Computer-supported collaboration
Encyclopedia
Computer-supported collaboration
(CSC) research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working relationships. As net technology increasingly supported a wide range of recreational and social activities, consumer markets expanded the user base, enabling more and more people to connect online to create what researchers have called a computer supported cooperative work, which includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music" (from CSCW 2004).
deals specifically with how humans use "computers" (or digital media
) to form, support and maintain relationships with others (social uses), regulate information flow (instructional uses), and make decisions (including major financial and political ones). It does not focus on common work products or other "collaboration" but rather on "meeting" itself, and on trust
. By contrast, CSC is focused on the output from, rather than the character or emotional consequences of, meetings or relationships, reflecting the difference between "communication" and "collaboration".
, which focuses on truth
and logic
, CSC focuses on cooperation
and collaboration
and decision making
theory, which are more concerned with rendezvous and contract
. For instance, auction
s and market system
s, which rely on bid and ask
relationships, are studied as part of CSC but not usually as part of communication.
The term CSC emerged in the 1990s to replace the following terms:
Base technologies such as netnews, email
, chat
and wiki
could be described as either "social" or "collaborative". Those who say "social" seem to focus on so-called "virtual community
" while those who say "collaborative" seem to be more concerned with content management
and the actual output. While software may be designed to achieve closer social ties or specific deliverables, it is hard to support collaboration without also enabling relationships to form, and hard to support a social interaction without some kind of shared co-authored works.
s and MMRPGs in the 1980s and 1990s led many to this conclusion, which is now not controversial.
True multi-player computer games can be considered a simple form of collaboration, but only a few theorists include this as part of CSC.
to describe the field, in an attempt to invoke existing social conventions or contexts as opposed to technological attributes: the use of e-mail for maintaining social relationships, instant messaging for daily microcoordination at one's workplace, or weblogs as a community building tool. Most researchers argue that these are all forms of collaboration, not forms of "computing", making this variant term an oxymoron
: whatever is "social" about software, it is not the "computing" aspect. The term has not caught on much beyond IBM.
However, the relatively new areas of evolutionary computing, massively parallel algorithms, and even "artificial life" explore the solution of problems by the evolving interaction of large numbers of small actors, or agents, or decision-makers who interact in a largely unconstrained fashion. The "side effect" of the interaction may be a solution of interest, such as a new sorting algorithm; or there may be a permanent residual of the interaction, such as the setting of weights in a neural network that has now been "tuned" or "trained" to repeatedly solve a specific problem, such as making a decision about granting credit to a person, or distinguishing a diseased plant from a healthy one. Connectionism is a study of systems in which the learning is stored in the linkages, or connections, not in what is normally thought of as content.
This larger definition of "computing", in which not just the data, or the metadata, or the context of the data, but the computer itself is being "processed", makes the term "social computing" have a whole different meaning. The repeated use of the "blogosphere
" to process daily news has a "side effect" of building up linkage maps, trusted sources, RSS aggregator feeds, etc., so that the overall system is, in some sense, learning how to do something better, more rapidly, and more easily.
In control systems theory, it has been shown that closed-loop feedback systems are vastly more robust than open-loop system. The blogosphere has been criticized for having "echos" or repeatedly cycling certain ideas, but the upside is that there are simultaneous closed-loop feedback paths across a wide spectrum of distance and time-constants. These issues of computability and algorithm-order are classic computer-science issues and, in that sense, social computing is again a legitimate "computing" subject, even if it involves flexible collaboration as part of the "hardware". An analogy might be to imagine a "computer" built entirely of field-programmable gate-arrays, where not just the data and the program itself can be modified in flight (as in LISP, where programs and data are indistinguishable), but the hardware and logic and rules of operation also can be modified real-time during a "computation".
If the collaboration is over a large distance and many time-zones, the system will probably encounter significant differences in context between the components, resulting in a whole new set of design and support problems and behaviors, especially misunderstanding of what is taken as implicit or obvious by different collaborators, and therefore not explicitly stated. Such differences may be cultural, geographic, hierarchical, etc. For example, when Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. in Fall, 2005, there were substantial collaboration and communication difficulties between Federal, State, and local officials. A significant portion of those difficulties were classic issues that very frequently result from attempts to collaborate over a distance, and from people at one level in an organization trying to collaborate with people at an entirely different level of an organization, with each group having different meanings to what "the problem" is that is being addressed and what time-scale is relevant. Computer-supported collaboration research includes academic research into how to minimize, or at least recognize that class of problem in collaboration and take it into account. Similar problems may occur if a conversation or collaboration occurs when it is a work day at one site or in one country, and already a week-end or holiday in another site, and the parties have different levels of stress and focus. These problems are analogies to "flame wars", the abrupt hostility that has been observed to occur when e-mail is used for a conversation, when the parties are no longer getting direct feedback from watching each other's body language.
A final difference between computer-supported collaboration and classic "computing" is that a computer typically remains a closed system, focusing only on what is already "inside the box", and only dealing with it in an abstract or mental fashion. Collaboration that occurs over a significant period of space and time shares properties of "active vision", where the actions possible are more than just analyzing an incoming TV image of an object of interest, but include walking over to the object, picking it up, turning it over, smashing it open, etc. The collaborating "units" are human beings, typically, who remain partly involved in the collaboration, and partly both sensing and actively changing the world around them. A collaborative discussion of baking cookies could include a period in which participants left the room to actually bake such cookies and try them out. A collaborative discussion of politics could include actually voting and changing the political landscape. This inclusion of both active sensors and active "effectors" is again a difference from "computing" that, at a minimum, makes this field at least as complex as "robotics".
Also, as stated earlier, generally a computer is unaltered by the program it is running or the data it is processing, but a collaboration of people and groups is typically substantially and permanently altered by the nature of problems it works on, the enjoyment or frustration with the working process, and the outcome of the work. This lasting residual "side effect" or "effect" of one "cycle" of the collaboration then may alter the way in which the collaboration tool is use for the next "cycle", as people learn how to use this new method, so short-term, single-session or single-problem studies of collaboration tools may be very misleading as to what the longer-term outcomes may be. Imagine that your desktop computer, after a while, decided it didn't really like to do word-processing any more and preferred to work on addition, and that every time you tried to write e-mail the computer stopped mid-course to become obsessed with doing word-counts. Analogous behaviors in CSC, as with "game-theory", make studying almost any system or design problem frustratingly complicated: either the problems involved seem to be "toy" problems that are doable but unrealistically simple, or the problems become so complex that analysis is impossible.
A "computer" doesn't generally care whether the answer to a problem is "5" or "25", "yes" or "no," but humans involved in a group decision-making process may care very much about the outcome, and the various answers can have winners and losers with potentially very high stakes. At a minimum, this introduces substantial bias into the analysis of any data, as people will tend to selectively see facts that support the conclusions they personally prefer. In a collaboration within a single hospital between multiple clinicians, mediated by an "electronic medical record", there may actually be a substantial amount of dispute and negotiation going on among, say, a group focusing on treating diabetes and another group focusing on treating congestive heart failure. The "collaboration" may actually be much more of a "competition" to frame and define the problem in terms that result in favorable outcomes. Again, this makes CSC design work far more complicated than simply trying to get a group of sensors or computers to share data and work together correctly. In fact, in some cases, participants may have a strong vested interest in the status quo and prefer as an outcome that the "problem" not be solved. A successful CSC system, in their minds, would be one that prevented the solution of the problem supposedly being addressed collaboratively, perhaps while giving a misleading appearance of cooperative effort. This factor complicates research into whether a CSC system is well-designed or not.
For example, in some countries national political elections could be viewed, abstractly, as heavily technology-mediated (and "computer supported") processes, including information distribution, discussion, debate, and an outcome resolution process - yet there may not be a unanimous opinion as to whether this process "works" or "is broken." It is difficult to improve or redesign a system if people can't even agree on whether the system works now or not. The implications of this is that CSC systems are inextricably embedded in social contexts and have to simultaneously address a specific problem, plus the issue of whether collaboration this way increases the ability to address future problems, plus the issue of what really defines which problems need to be addressed in the first place and the relative priority of those problems.
And, not only is there difference and potential competition between parties across organizational and cultural and geographic dimensions—opinions on all those subjects may differ, and generally will differ, even within any given organization at different hierarchical levels. What works for workers may not work for management. What works for middle-management may not work for upper-management. What works for management may not work for the stockholders. What works for the company may not work for the country. A CSC system has to handle not just "content processing" but also "context processing" in that sense, sorting out the different nested and overlapping value-laden reference frames as well as the data and "the explicitly identified problem" within those reference frames. Part of this is a very abstract technical problem, faced by researchers in distributed artificial intelligence, in getting, say, 20 different surveillance robotic vehicles to talk to each other and compare notes - which is in itself a hard problem. Add to that complexity a new factor that, say, each of the robots has a hidden agenda and is not being totally honest about what it shares.
If the preceding discussion gives the impression that CSC problems are extraordinarily hard to solve, that's correct. In fact, they have been described as "wicked" problems, not only because they are immensely complicated when addressed, but because they look so simple from the outside and are generally under-appreciated. For example, building a disaster-response communication system is vastly more complex than just getting a unified frequency for different agencies to use to communicate with each other, because the words, meanings, contexts, values, and agendas all also have to be communicated and resolved, across space, across time, and across a 14-level hierarchy from the national leader to the front-line responder.
The view of a scene from an infection-control specialist's viewpoint and from a military or police viewpoint may suggest exactly opposite actions regarding "rounding up people and concentrating them at the stadium." The ability of a CSC system to facilitate wise decisions and action in that sort of situation might require the type of action described by the Harvard Negotiation Project in the book "Getting to Yes", where "positions" have to be abstracted to "interests", perhaps repeatedly, until a level is reached at which agreement and a common ground can be found between groups that appear, on the surface, to be hopelessly deadlocked. It is an open research question as to what features of a CSC system could simply allow that type of discussion to occur, let alone facilitate it. Very high bandwidth and multiple "back-channel" communication pathways have often proven to be helpful. Apparently very simple things, such as sufficient magnification and resolution on video screens to be able to actually see another person's eyes clearly, can have a dramatic effect on the ability of a system to support trust-building and collaboration at a distance.
Reflecting desired organization protocols and business process
es and governance
norms directly, so that regulated communication (the collaboration) can be told apart from free-form interactions, is important to collaboration research, if only to know where to stop the study of work and start the study of people. The subfield CMC or computer-mediated communication
deals with human relationships.
:
Problems of method, communication and comprehension in collaborations between ethnographer and system developer are also of special concern.
A 2004 list of "coordination and communication technologies" included:
Plenary addresses on Open Source Society and Hacking Law suggest a bold, civilization-building, ambition for this research.
Less ambitiously, specific CSC fields are often studied under their own names with no reference to the more general field of study, focusing instead on the technology with only minimal attention to the collaboration implied, e.g. video games, videoconferences. Since some specialized devices exist for games or conferences that do not include all of the usual boot image
capabilities of a true "computer", studying these separately may be justified. There is also separate study of e-learning
, e-government, e-democracy
and telemedicine
. The subfield telework also often stands alone.
, Douglas Engelbart
, Alan Kay
, Glenn Gould
, Nicholas Negroponte
and others who saw a potential for digital media
to ultimately redefine how we work. A very early thinker, Vannevar Bush
, even suggested in 1945 As We May Think
.
, studied collaborative software
(especially revision control
in computer-aided software engineering
and the way a graphic user interface could enable interpersonal communication) in the 1960s. Alan Kay
worked on Smalltalk
, which embodied these principles, in the 1970s, and by the 1980s it was well regarded and considered to represent the future of user interfaces.
However, at this time, collaboration capabilities were limited. As few computers had even local area network
s, and processors were slow and expensive, the idea of using them simply to accelerate and "augment" human communication was eccentric in many situations. Computers processed numbers, not text, and the collaboration was in general devoted only to better and more accurate handling of numbers.
s, modem
s and more general use of the Internet
for non-academic purposes. People were clearly collaborating online with all sorts of motives, but using a small suite of tools (LISTSERV
, netnews, IRC
, MUD
) to support all of those motives. Research at this time focused on textual communication, as there was little or no exchange of audio and video representations. Some researchers, such as Brenda Laurel
, emphasized how similar online dialogue
was to a play
, and applied Aristotle
's model of drama
to their analysis of computers for collaboration.
Another major focus was hypertext
—in its pre-HTML
, pre-WWW form, focused more on links and semantic web
applications than on graphics. Such systems as Superbook
, NoteCards
, KMS
and the much simpler HyperTies and HyperCard
were early examples of collaborative software
used for e-learning
.
networks and the dotcom boom presented the Internet as mass media to a whole generation. By the late 1990s, VoIP and net phones and audio chat had emerged. For the first time, people used computers primarily as communications, not "computing" devices. This, however, had long been anticipated, predicted, and studied by experts in the field.
Video collaboration is not usually studied. Online videoconferencing and webcam
s have been studied in small scale use for decades but since people simply do not have built-in facilities to create video together directly, they are properly a communication, not collaboration, concern.
Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction
biannually in the fall since 1984. The most recent conference was in 2008. Starting with the next conference in 2010, CSCW becomes an annual event held in February. In the beginning, the conferences were small affairs focused on such specific applications as hypertext
—which soon got its own conference.
The conference series began when, according to Jonathan Grudin
: "Paul Cashman and Irene Greif organized a workshop of people from various disciplines who shared an interest in how people work, with an eye to understanding how technology could support them. They coined the term computer-supported cooperative work to describe this common interest... thousands of researchers and developers have been drawn to it."
According to Grudin, "an earlier approach to group support, Office Automation, had run out of steam. The problems were not primarily technical, although technical challenges certainly existed. The key problem was understanding system requirements. In the mid-1960s, tasks such as filling seats on airplane flights or printing payroll checks had been translated into requirements that resulted (with some trial and error) in successful mainframe systems. In the mid-1970s, minicomputers promised to support groups and organizations in more sophisticated, interactive ways: Office Automation was born. Single-user applications such as word processor
s and spreadsheet
s succeeded; office automation tried to integrate and extend these successes to support groups and departments. But what were the precise requirements for such systems?"
, Austin Henderson, Kjeld Schmidt, Lucy Suchman
, Sara Bly, Randy Farmer
, and many "economist
s, social psychologist
s, anthropologist
s, organizational theorists, educator
s, and anyone else who can shed light on group activity." - Grudin.
, political science
, management science and other business
disciplines. This reflects the use of the net in politics and business and even other high-stakes collaboration situations, such as war.
has been a very major impetus of work on map
s and data fusion
, used in military intelligence
. A number of conferences and journals are concerned primarily with the military use of digital media and the security implications thereof.
episode
Early researchers, such as Bill Buxton
, had focused on non-voice gestures (like humming or whistling
) as a way to communicate with the machine while not interfering too directly with speech directed at a person. Some researchers believed voice as command interfaces were bad for this reason, because they encouraged speaking as if to a "slave". A notable innovation was the emergence of the video prototype - Apple Computer
used it to test the likely user acceptance of a voice interface. They had very mixed results, and decided not to pursue such an interface at the time (late 1980s).
of all types of links? Is there one per industry? Per profession? Per culture?
Since the 1960s, researchers had been insisting that links should have types—that, for instance, a link that "contradicts" another should be easy to differentiate from one that "supports" another: all of the early hypertext systems had schemes for doing exactly this, somehow.
HTML supports simple link types with the REL tag and REV tag. Some standards for using these on the WWW were proposed, most notably in 1994, by people very familiar with earlier work in SGML. However, no such scheme has ever been adopted by a large number of web users, and the "semantic web
" remains unrealized. Heroic attempts such as crit.org have sometimes collapsed totally.
A lot of CSC researchers ask why, and why the interest in applying a semantic web standard should continue despite so many failed attempts.
Online identity
and privacy
concerns, especially identity theft
, have grown to dominate the CSCW agenda in more recent years. The separate Computers, Freedom and Privacy conferences deal with larger social questions, but basic concerns that apply to systems and work process design tend still to be discussed as part of CSC research.
Team consensus decision making in software engineering
, and the role of revision control
, revert, reputation
and other functions, has always been a major focus of CSC: There is no software without someone writing it. Presumably, those who do write it must understand something about collaboration in their own team. This design and code, however, is only one form of collaborative content.
By the late 1990s, with the rise of wiki
s (a simple repository
and data dictionary
that was easy for the public to use), the way consensus applied to joint editing, meeting agendas and so on had become a major concern. Different wikis adopted different social and pseudopolitical structures to combat the problems caused by conflicting points of view and differing opinions on content.
Tools and techniques for designing and running effective "collaboratories" among researchers with similar interests and a common language have been developed over the last 20 years and are well documented in the literature. Much of this hard-won knowledge regards process as much as it does technology.
In Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work, Johndan Johnson-Eilola describes a specific computer-supported collaboriatin space: The Smart Board. According to Johnson-Eilola, a “Smart Board system provides a 72-inch, rear projection, touchscreen, intelligent whiteboard surface for work” (79). In Datacloud, Johnson-Eilola asserts that “[w]e are attempting to understand how users move within information spaces, how users can exist within information spaces rather than merely gaze at them, and how information spaces must be shared with others rather than being private, lived within rather than simply visited” (82). He explains how the Smart Board system offers an information space that allows his students to engage in active collaboration. He makes three distinct claims regarding the functionality of the technology: 1) The Smart Board allows users to work with large amounts of information, 2) It offers an information space that invites active collaboration, 3) The work produced is often “dynamic and contingent” (82).
Johnson-Eilola further explains that with the Smart Board “…information work becom[es] a bodied experience” (81). Users have the opportunity to engage with—inhabit—the technology by direct manipulation. Moreover, this space allows for more than one user; essentially, it invites multiple users.
Study of content management
, enterprise taxonomy and the other core instructional capital
of the learning organization
has become increasingly important due to ISO standards and the use of continuous improvement methods. Natural language and application commands tend to converge over time, becoming reflexive user interfaces. A concern that overlaps with OOPSLA
.
The role of social network analysis and outsourcing
services like e-lance, especially when combined in services like LinkedIn
, is of particular concern in human capital
management—again, especially in the software industry, where it is becoming more and more normal to run 24x7 globally distributed shops.
, CAD
/CAM
, computer-aided software engineering
(CASE), concurrent engineering, workflow management, distance learning, telemedicine
, medical CSCW
and the real-time network conferences called MUD
s (after "multi-user dungeons," although they are now used for more than game-playing).
Collaboration
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, — for example, an intriguing endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing...
(CSC) research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working relationships. As net technology increasingly supported a wide range of recreational and social activities, consumer markets expanded the user base, enabling more and more people to connect online to create what researchers have called a computer supported cooperative work, which includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music" (from CSCW 2004).
Focused on output
The subfield computer-mediated communicationComputer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication is defined as any communicative transaction that occurs through the use of two or more networked computers...
deals specifically with how humans use "computers" (or digital media
Digital media
Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital form. It can refer to the technical aspect of storage and transmission Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analog) form. It can refer to the technical aspect of...
) to form, support and maintain relationships with others (social uses), regulate information flow (instructional uses), and make decisions (including major financial and political ones). It does not focus on common work products or other "collaboration" but rather on "meeting" itself, and on trust
Trust (sociology)
In a social context, trust has several connotations. Definitions of trust typically refer to a situation characterised by the following aspects: One party is willing to rely on the actions of another party ; the situation is directed to the future. In addition, the trustor abandons control over...
. By contrast, CSC is focused on the output from, rather than the character or emotional consequences of, meetings or relationships, reflecting the difference between "communication" and "collaboration".
Focused on contracts and rendezvous
Unlike communication research, which focuses on trust, or computer scienceComputer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, which focuses on truth
Truth
Truth has a variety of meanings, such as the state of being in accord with fact or reality. It can also mean having fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal. In a common usage, it also means constancy or sincerity in action or character...
and logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, CSC focuses on cooperation
Cooperation
Cooperation or co-operation is the process of working or acting together. In its simplest form it involves things working in harmony, side by side, while in its more complicated forms, it can involve something as complex as the inner workings of a human being or even the social patterns of a...
and collaboration
Collaboration
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, — for example, an intriguing endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing...
and decision making
Decision making
Decision making can be regarded as the mental processes resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.- Overview :Human performance in decision terms...
theory, which are more concerned with rendezvous and contract
Contract
A contract is an agreement entered into by two parties or more with the intention of creating a legal obligation, which may have elements in writing. Contracts can be made orally. The remedy for breach of contract can be "damages" or compensation of money. In equity, the remedy can be specific...
. For instance, auction
Auction
An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder...
s and market system
Market system
A market system is any systematic process enabling many market players to bid and ask: helping bidders and sellers interact and make deals. It is not just the price mechanism but the entire system of regulation, qualification, credentials, reputations and clearing that surrounds that mechanism and...
s, which rely on bid and ask
Bid and ask
Price mechanism is an economic term that refers to the buyers and sellers who negotiate prices of goods or services depending on demand and supply. A price mechanism or market-based mechanism refers to a wide variety of ways to match up buyers and sellers through price rationing.An example of a...
relationships, are studied as part of CSC but not usually as part of communication.
The term CSC emerged in the 1990s to replace the following terms:
- workgroup computing, which emphasizes technology over the work being supported and seems to restrict inquiry to small organizational units.
- groupware, which became a commercial buzzwordBuzzwordA buzzword is a term of art, salesmanship, politics, or technical jargon that is used in the media and wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context....
and was used to describe popular commercial products such as Lotus Notes. Check here for a comprehensive literature review. - computer supported cooperative work, which is the name of a conference and which seems only to address research into experimental systems and the nature of workplaces and organizations doing "work", as opposed, say, to play or war.
Collaboration is not software
Two different types of software are sometimes differentiated:- social softwareSocial softwareSocial software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...
, which produces social ties as its primary output, e.g., a social network serviceSocial network serviceA social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user , his/her social... - collaborative softwareCollaborative softwareCollaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...
, which produces a collaborative deliverable, e.g., a political wiki producing a platform
Base technologies such as netnews, email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
, chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...
and wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
could be described as either "social" or "collaborative". Those who say "social" seem to focus on so-called "virtual community
Virtual community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...
" while those who say "collaborative" seem to be more concerned with content management
Content management
Content management, or CM, is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. In recent times this information is typically referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content...
and the actual output. While software may be designed to achieve closer social ties or specific deliverables, it is hard to support collaboration without also enabling relationships to form, and hard to support a social interaction without some kind of shared co-authored works.
May include games
Accordingly, the differentiation between social and collaborative software may also be stated as that between "play" and "work". Some theorists hold that a play ethic should apply, and that work must become more game-like or play-like in order to make using computers a more comfortable experience. The study of MUDMUD
A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...
s and MMRPGs in the 1980s and 1990s led many to this conclusion, which is now not controversial.
True multi-player computer games can be considered a simple form of collaboration, but only a few theorists include this as part of CSC.
Not just about "computing"
The term social computing is used mostly at IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
to describe the field, in an attempt to invoke existing social conventions or contexts as opposed to technological attributes: the use of e-mail for maintaining social relationships, instant messaging for daily microcoordination at one's workplace, or weblogs as a community building tool. Most researchers argue that these are all forms of collaboration, not forms of "computing", making this variant term an oxymoron
Oxymoron
An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms...
: whatever is "social" about software, it is not the "computing" aspect. The term has not caught on much beyond IBM.
However, the relatively new areas of evolutionary computing, massively parallel algorithms, and even "artificial life" explore the solution of problems by the evolving interaction of large numbers of small actors, or agents, or decision-makers who interact in a largely unconstrained fashion. The "side effect" of the interaction may be a solution of interest, such as a new sorting algorithm; or there may be a permanent residual of the interaction, such as the setting of weights in a neural network that has now been "tuned" or "trained" to repeatedly solve a specific problem, such as making a decision about granting credit to a person, or distinguishing a diseased plant from a healthy one. Connectionism is a study of systems in which the learning is stored in the linkages, or connections, not in what is normally thought of as content.
This larger definition of "computing", in which not just the data, or the metadata, or the context of the data, but the computer itself is being "processed", makes the term "social computing" have a whole different meaning. The repeated use of the "blogosphere
Blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions...
" to process daily news has a "side effect" of building up linkage maps, trusted sources, RSS aggregator feeds, etc., so that the overall system is, in some sense, learning how to do something better, more rapidly, and more easily.
In control systems theory, it has been shown that closed-loop feedback systems are vastly more robust than open-loop system. The blogosphere has been criticized for having "echos" or repeatedly cycling certain ideas, but the upside is that there are simultaneous closed-loop feedback paths across a wide spectrum of distance and time-constants. These issues of computability and algorithm-order are classic computer-science issues and, in that sense, social computing is again a legitimate "computing" subject, even if it involves flexible collaboration as part of the "hardware". An analogy might be to imagine a "computer" built entirely of field-programmable gate-arrays, where not just the data and the program itself can be modified in flight (as in LISP, where programs and data are indistinguishable), but the hardware and logic and rules of operation also can be modified real-time during a "computation".
If the collaboration is over a large distance and many time-zones, the system will probably encounter significant differences in context between the components, resulting in a whole new set of design and support problems and behaviors, especially misunderstanding of what is taken as implicit or obvious by different collaborators, and therefore not explicitly stated. Such differences may be cultural, geographic, hierarchical, etc. For example, when Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. in Fall, 2005, there were substantial collaboration and communication difficulties between Federal, State, and local officials. A significant portion of those difficulties were classic issues that very frequently result from attempts to collaborate over a distance, and from people at one level in an organization trying to collaborate with people at an entirely different level of an organization, with each group having different meanings to what "the problem" is that is being addressed and what time-scale is relevant. Computer-supported collaboration research includes academic research into how to minimize, or at least recognize that class of problem in collaboration and take it into account. Similar problems may occur if a conversation or collaboration occurs when it is a work day at one site or in one country, and already a week-end or holiday in another site, and the parties have different levels of stress and focus. These problems are analogies to "flame wars", the abrupt hostility that has been observed to occur when e-mail is used for a conversation, when the parties are no longer getting direct feedback from watching each other's body language.
A final difference between computer-supported collaboration and classic "computing" is that a computer typically remains a closed system, focusing only on what is already "inside the box", and only dealing with it in an abstract or mental fashion. Collaboration that occurs over a significant period of space and time shares properties of "active vision", where the actions possible are more than just analyzing an incoming TV image of an object of interest, but include walking over to the object, picking it up, turning it over, smashing it open, etc. The collaborating "units" are human beings, typically, who remain partly involved in the collaboration, and partly both sensing and actively changing the world around them. A collaborative discussion of baking cookies could include a period in which participants left the room to actually bake such cookies and try them out. A collaborative discussion of politics could include actually voting and changing the political landscape. This inclusion of both active sensors and active "effectors" is again a difference from "computing" that, at a minimum, makes this field at least as complex as "robotics".
Also, as stated earlier, generally a computer is unaltered by the program it is running or the data it is processing, but a collaboration of people and groups is typically substantially and permanently altered by the nature of problems it works on, the enjoyment or frustration with the working process, and the outcome of the work. This lasting residual "side effect" or "effect" of one "cycle" of the collaboration then may alter the way in which the collaboration tool is use for the next "cycle", as people learn how to use this new method, so short-term, single-session or single-problem studies of collaboration tools may be very misleading as to what the longer-term outcomes may be. Imagine that your desktop computer, after a while, decided it didn't really like to do word-processing any more and preferred to work on addition, and that every time you tried to write e-mail the computer stopped mid-course to become obsessed with doing word-counts. Analogous behaviors in CSC, as with "game-theory", make studying almost any system or design problem frustratingly complicated: either the problems involved seem to be "toy" problems that are doable but unrealistically simple, or the problems become so complex that analysis is impossible.
A "computer" doesn't generally care whether the answer to a problem is "5" or "25", "yes" or "no," but humans involved in a group decision-making process may care very much about the outcome, and the various answers can have winners and losers with potentially very high stakes. At a minimum, this introduces substantial bias into the analysis of any data, as people will tend to selectively see facts that support the conclusions they personally prefer. In a collaboration within a single hospital between multiple clinicians, mediated by an "electronic medical record", there may actually be a substantial amount of dispute and negotiation going on among, say, a group focusing on treating diabetes and another group focusing on treating congestive heart failure. The "collaboration" may actually be much more of a "competition" to frame and define the problem in terms that result in favorable outcomes. Again, this makes CSC design work far more complicated than simply trying to get a group of sensors or computers to share data and work together correctly. In fact, in some cases, participants may have a strong vested interest in the status quo and prefer as an outcome that the "problem" not be solved. A successful CSC system, in their minds, would be one that prevented the solution of the problem supposedly being addressed collaboratively, perhaps while giving a misleading appearance of cooperative effort. This factor complicates research into whether a CSC system is well-designed or not.
For example, in some countries national political elections could be viewed, abstractly, as heavily technology-mediated (and "computer supported") processes, including information distribution, discussion, debate, and an outcome resolution process - yet there may not be a unanimous opinion as to whether this process "works" or "is broken." It is difficult to improve or redesign a system if people can't even agree on whether the system works now or not. The implications of this is that CSC systems are inextricably embedded in social contexts and have to simultaneously address a specific problem, plus the issue of whether collaboration this way increases the ability to address future problems, plus the issue of what really defines which problems need to be addressed in the first place and the relative priority of those problems.
And, not only is there difference and potential competition between parties across organizational and cultural and geographic dimensions—opinions on all those subjects may differ, and generally will differ, even within any given organization at different hierarchical levels. What works for workers may not work for management. What works for middle-management may not work for upper-management. What works for management may not work for the stockholders. What works for the company may not work for the country. A CSC system has to handle not just "content processing" but also "context processing" in that sense, sorting out the different nested and overlapping value-laden reference frames as well as the data and "the explicitly identified problem" within those reference frames. Part of this is a very abstract technical problem, faced by researchers in distributed artificial intelligence, in getting, say, 20 different surveillance robotic vehicles to talk to each other and compare notes - which is in itself a hard problem. Add to that complexity a new factor that, say, each of the robots has a hidden agenda and is not being totally honest about what it shares.
If the preceding discussion gives the impression that CSC problems are extraordinarily hard to solve, that's correct. In fact, they have been described as "wicked" problems, not only because they are immensely complicated when addressed, but because they look so simple from the outside and are generally under-appreciated. For example, building a disaster-response communication system is vastly more complex than just getting a unified frequency for different agencies to use to communicate with each other, because the words, meanings, contexts, values, and agendas all also have to be communicated and resolved, across space, across time, and across a 14-level hierarchy from the national leader to the front-line responder.
The view of a scene from an infection-control specialist's viewpoint and from a military or police viewpoint may suggest exactly opposite actions regarding "rounding up people and concentrating them at the stadium." The ability of a CSC system to facilitate wise decisions and action in that sort of situation might require the type of action described by the Harvard Negotiation Project in the book "Getting to Yes", where "positions" have to be abstracted to "interests", perhaps repeatedly, until a level is reached at which agreement and a common ground can be found between groups that appear, on the surface, to be hopelessly deadlocked. It is an open research question as to what features of a CSC system could simply allow that type of discussion to occur, let alone facilitate it. Very high bandwidth and multiple "back-channel" communication pathways have often proven to be helpful. Apparently very simple things, such as sufficient magnification and resolution on video screens to be able to actually see another person's eyes clearly, can have a dramatic effect on the ability of a system to support trust-building and collaboration at a distance.
Requires protocols
Communication essential to the collaboration, or disruptive of it, is studied in CSC proper. It is somehow hard to find or draw a line between a well-defined process and general human communications.Reflecting desired organization protocols and business process
Business process
A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product for a particular customer or customers...
es and governance
Governance
Governance is the act of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists of either a separate process or part of management or leadership processes...
norms directly, so that regulated communication (the collaboration) can be told apart from free-form interactions, is important to collaboration research, if only to know where to stop the study of work and start the study of people. The subfield CMC or computer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication is defined as any communicative transaction that occurs through the use of two or more networked computers...
deals with human relationships.
Basic tasks
Tasks undertaken in this field resemble those of any social science, but with a special focus on systems integration and groupsGroup (sociology)
In the social sciences a social group can be defined as two or more humans who interact with one another, share similar characteristics and collectively have a sense of unity...
:
- Discover the multidisciplinary nature of computer supported cooperative work
- Discuss experiences with technologies that support communication, collaboration, and coordination
- Understand behavioral, social, and organizational challenges to developing and using these technologies
- Learn successful development and usage approaches
- Anticipate future trends in technology use and global social impacts
- Analyze CMC systems and interaction via social softwareSocial softwareSocial software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...
- Design CMC systems to facilitate desirable outcomes
- Apply CMC analysis and visualization tools
- Find uses of video conferencing, if any
- Apply social ergonomics
- Work environment design and A/V considerations
- Improve audio and video encoding - from grainy thumbnails to HD
- Improve and integrate common video conferencing tools
- Analyze work processes, e.g. with the support of video monitoring
- Deploy and evaluate systems for use in particular work contexts
- Take theoretical perspectives to fieldwork, dealing with social complexity.
- Performing observational studies
- Work in commercial and industrial settings, domestic environments and public spaces
Problems of method, communication and comprehension in collaborations between ethnographer and system developer are also of special concern.
A 2004 list of "coordination and communication technologies" included:
- "Innovations and experiences with Intranets, the Internet, WWW"
- "Innovative installations: CSCW and the arts"
- "Innovative technologies and architectures to support group activity, awareness and telepresenceTelepresenceTelepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance of being present, or to have an effect, via telerobotics, at a place other than their true location....
" - "Social and organizational effects of introducing technologiesTechnological escalationTechnological escalation describes the situation where two parties in competition tend to employ continual technological improvements in their attempt to defeat each other. Technology is defined here as a creative invention, either in the form of an object or a methodology...
" - "Theoretical aspects of coordination and communicationCommunicationCommunication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...
" - "Methodologies and tools for design and analysis of collaborative practices", e.g. social network analysis
- "Ethnographic and case studies of work practice"
- "Working with and through collections of heterogeneous technologies"
- "Emerging issues for global systems"
Plenary addresses on Open Source Society and Hacking Law suggest a bold, civilization-building, ambition for this research.
Less ambitiously, specific CSC fields are often studied under their own names with no reference to the more general field of study, focusing instead on the technology with only minimal attention to the collaboration implied, e.g. video games, videoconferences. Since some specialized devices exist for games or conferences that do not include all of the usual boot image
Boot image
A boot image is a type of disk image . When it is transferred onto a boot device it allows the associated hardware to boot....
capabilities of a true "computer", studying these separately may be justified. There is also separate study of e-learning
E-learning
E-learning comprises all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching. The information and communication systems, whether networked learning or not, serve as specific media to implement the learning process...
, e-government, e-democracy
E-democracy
E-democracy refers to the use of information technologies and communication technologies and strategies in political and governance processes...
and telemedicine
Telemedicine
Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities...
. The subfield telework also often stands alone.
Early research
The development of this field reaches back to the late 1960s and the visionary assertions of Ted NelsonTed Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
, Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
, Alan Kay
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...
, Glenn Gould
Glenn Gould
Glenn Herbert Gould was a Canadian pianist who became one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. He was particularly renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach...
, Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte is an American architect best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of the One Laptop per Child Association ....
and others who saw a potential for digital media
Digital media
Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital form. It can refer to the technical aspect of storage and transmission Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analog) form. It can refer to the technical aspect of...
to ultimately redefine how we work. A very early thinker, Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
, even suggested in 1945 As We May Think
As We May Think
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
.
Numbers
The inventor of the computer "mouse", Douglas EngelbartDouglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
, studied collaborative software
Collaborative software
Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...
(especially revision control
Revision control
Revision control, also known as version control and source control , is the management of changes to documents, programs, and other information stored as computer files. It is most commonly used in software development, where a team of people may change the same files...
in computer-aided software engineering
Computer-aided software engineering
Computer-aided software engineering is the scientific application of a set of tools and methods to a software system which is meant to result in high-quality, defect-free, and maintainable software products...
and the way a graphic user interface could enable interpersonal communication) in the 1960s. Alan Kay
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...
worked on Smalltalk
Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...
, which embodied these principles, in the 1970s, and by the 1980s it was well regarded and considered to represent the future of user interfaces.
However, at this time, collaboration capabilities were limited. As few computers had even local area network
Local area network
A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...
s, and processors were slow and expensive, the idea of using them simply to accelerate and "augment" human communication was eccentric in many situations. Computers processed numbers, not text, and the collaboration was in general devoted only to better and more accurate handling of numbers.
Text
This began to change in the 1980s with the rise of personal computerPersonal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s, modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s and more general use of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
for non-academic purposes. People were clearly collaborating online with all sorts of motives, but using a small suite of tools (LISTSERV
LISTSERV
LISTSERV was the first electronic mailing list software application, consisting of a set of email addresses for a group in which the sender can send one email and it will reach a variety of people...
, netnews, IRC
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...
, MUD
MUD
A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...
) to support all of those motives. Research at this time focused on textual communication, as there was little or no exchange of audio and video representations. Some researchers, such as Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel is a pioneering writer, researcher, designer and entrepreneur in the fields of human-computer interaction, interactive narrative and cultural aspects of technology ....
, emphasized how similar online dialogue
Dialogue
Dialogue is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people....
was to a play
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
, and applied Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
's model of drama
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
to their analysis of computers for collaboration.
Another major focus was hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
—in its pre-HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
, pre-WWW form, focused more on links and semantic web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
applications than on graphics. Such systems as Superbook
Superbook
Superbook, also known as , is an anime television series produced by Tatsunoko Productions in Japan in conjunction with the Christian Broadcasting Network in the United States....
, NoteCards
NoteCards
NoteCards was a hypertext personal knowledge basesystem developed at Xerox PARC by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran in 1984. NoteCards developed after Trigg became the first to write a Ph.D. thesis on hypertext while at the University of Maryland College Park in 1983...
, KMS
KMS
-Organisations:* National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark, or Kort & Matrikelstyrelsen* Krueger Middle School, a school in San Antonio, Texas* Kemper Military School, a defunct military academy in Boonville, Missouri-Technology:* Knowledge Management System...
and the much simpler HyperTies and HyperCard
HyperCard
HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...
were early examples of collaborative software
Collaborative software
Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...
used for e-learning
E-learning
E-learning comprises all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching. The information and communication systems, whether networked learning or not, serve as specific media to implement the learning process...
.
Audio
In the 1990s, the rise of broadbandBroadband
The term broadband refers to a telecommunications signal or device of greater bandwidth, in some sense, than another standard or usual signal or device . Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times...
networks and the dotcom boom presented the Internet as mass media to a whole generation. By the late 1990s, VoIP and net phones and audio chat had emerged. For the first time, people used computers primarily as communications, not "computing" devices. This, however, had long been anticipated, predicted, and studied by experts in the field.
Video collaboration is not usually studied. Online videoconferencing and webcam
Webcam
A webcam is a video camera that feeds its images in real time to a computer or computer network, often via USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi.Their most popular use is the establishment of video links, permitting computers to act as videophones or videoconference stations. This common use as a video camera...
s have been studied in small scale use for decades but since people simply do not have built-in facilities to create video together directly, they are properly a communication, not collaboration, concern.
ACM conferences
The Computer Supported Cooperative Work conferences are held by the Association for Computing MachineryAssociation for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction
SIGCHI
SIGCHI is the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction, one of the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest groups....
biannually in the fall since 1984. The most recent conference was in 2008. Starting with the next conference in 2010, CSCW becomes an annual event held in February. In the beginning, the conferences were small affairs focused on such specific applications as hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
—which soon got its own conference.
The conference series began when, according to Jonathan Grudin
Jonathan Grudin
Jonathan Grudin is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work . Grudin is a pioneer of the field of CSCW and one of its most prolific contributors. His collaboration distance to other HCI researchers has been...
: "Paul Cashman and Irene Greif organized a workshop of people from various disciplines who shared an interest in how people work, with an eye to understanding how technology could support them. They coined the term computer-supported cooperative work to describe this common interest... thousands of researchers and developers have been drawn to it."
According to Grudin, "an earlier approach to group support, Office Automation, had run out of steam. The problems were not primarily technical, although technical challenges certainly existed. The key problem was understanding system requirements. In the mid-1960s, tasks such as filling seats on airplane flights or printing payroll checks had been translated into requirements that resulted (with some trial and error) in successful mainframe systems. In the mid-1970s, minicomputers promised to support groups and organizations in more sophisticated, interactive ways: Office Automation was born. Single-user applications such as word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s and spreadsheet
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
s succeeded; office automation tried to integrate and extend these successes to support groups and departments. But what were the precise requirements for such systems?"
Pioneers
Other pioneers in the field included Ted NelsonTed Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
, Austin Henderson, Kjeld Schmidt, Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman is a full Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom...
, Sara Bly, Randy Farmer
Randy Farmer
F. Randall "Randy" Farmer has created and organized numerous online communities. He is probably most famous for his role creating one of the first graphical online MMOGs, Lucasfilm's graphical MUD Habitat, with Chip Morningstar...
, and many "economist
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
s, social psychologist
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
s, anthropologist
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
s, organizational theorists, educator
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
s, and anyone else who can shed light on group activity." - Grudin.
Politics and business
In this century, the focus has shifted to sociologySociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
, management science and other business
Business
A business is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and administered to earn profit to increase the wealth of their owners. Businesses may also be not-for-profit...
disciplines. This reflects the use of the net in politics and business and even other high-stakes collaboration situations, such as war.
War
Though it is not studied at the ACM conferences, military use of collaborative softwareCollaborative software
Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...
has been a very major impetus of work on map
Map
A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes....
s and data fusion
Data fusion
Data fusion, is generally defined as the use of techniques that combine data from multiple sources and gather that information into discrete, actionable items in order to achieve inferences, which will be more efficient and narrowly tailored than if they were achieved by means of disparate...
, used in military intelligence
Military intelligence
Military intelligence is a military discipline that exploits a number of information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to commanders in support of their decisions....
. A number of conferences and journals are concerned primarily with the military use of digital media and the security implications thereof.
Voice command
"Computer..." - spoken often on every Star TrekStar Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
episode
Early researchers, such as Bill Buxton
Bill Buxton
William Arthur Stewart "Bill" Buxton is a Canadian computer scientist and designer. He is currently a Principal researcher at Microsoft Research...
, had focused on non-voice gestures (like humming or whistling
Whistling
Human whistling is the production of sound by means of carefully controlling a stream of air flowing through a small hole. Whistling can be achieved by creating a small opening with one's lips and then blowing or sucking air through the hole...
) as a way to communicate with the machine while not interfering too directly with speech directed at a person. Some researchers believed voice as command interfaces were bad for this reason, because they encouraged speaking as if to a "slave". A notable innovation was the emergence of the video prototype - Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
used it to test the likely user acceptance of a voice interface. They had very mixed results, and decided not to pursue such an interface at the time (late 1980s).
Link semantics
What's a "link"? What am I saying when I link something, or remove a link to something? Is there one taxonomyTaxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
of all types of links? Is there one per industry? Per profession? Per culture?
Since the 1960s, researchers had been insisting that links should have types—that, for instance, a link that "contradicts" another should be easy to differentiate from one that "supports" another: all of the early hypertext systems had schemes for doing exactly this, somehow.
HTML supports simple link types with the REL tag and REV tag. Some standards for using these on the WWW were proposed, most notably in 1994, by people very familiar with earlier work in SGML. However, no such scheme has ever been adopted by a large number of web users, and the "semantic web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
" remains unrealized. Heroic attempts such as crit.org have sometimes collapsed totally.
A lot of CSC researchers ask why, and why the interest in applying a semantic web standard should continue despite so many failed attempts.
Identity and privacy
Who am I, online? Can an account be assumed to be the same as a person's real-life identity? Should I have rights to continue any relationship I start through a service, even if I'm not using it any longer? Who owns information about the user? What about others (not the user) who are affected by information revealed or learned by me?Online identity
Digital identity
Digital identity is the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of people's experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things...
and privacy
Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...
concerns, especially identity theft
Identity theft
Identity theft is a form of stealing another person's identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name...
, have grown to dominate the CSCW agenda in more recent years. The separate Computers, Freedom and Privacy conferences deal with larger social questions, but basic concerns that apply to systems and work process design tend still to be discussed as part of CSC research.
Online decision making
Where decisions are made based exclusively or mostly on information received or exchanged online, how do people rendezvous to signal their trust in it, and willingness to make major decisions on it?Team consensus decision making in software engineering
Software engineering
Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...
, and the role of revision control
Revision control
Revision control, also known as version control and source control , is the management of changes to documents, programs, and other information stored as computer files. It is most commonly used in software development, where a team of people may change the same files...
, revert, reputation
Reputation
Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria...
and other functions, has always been a major focus of CSC: There is no software without someone writing it. Presumably, those who do write it must understand something about collaboration in their own team. This design and code, however, is only one form of collaborative content.
Collaborative content
What are the most efficient and effective ways to share information? Can creative networks form through online meeting/work systems? Can people have equal power relationships in building content?By the late 1990s, with the rise of wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
s (a simple repository
Repository (publishing)
A repository in publishing, and especially in academic publishing,is a real or virtual facility for the deposit of academic publications, such as academic journal articles....
and data dictionary
Data dictionary
A data dictionary, or metadata repository, as defined in the IBM Dictionary of Computing, is a "centralized repository of information about data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format." The term may have one of several closely related meanings pertaining to...
that was easy for the public to use), the way consensus applied to joint editing, meeting agendas and so on had become a major concern. Different wikis adopted different social and pseudopolitical structures to combat the problems caused by conflicting points of view and differing opinions on content.
Collaboratories
A report on collaboratories, prepared under the auspices of the National Research Council, described a collaboratory as a . . . center without walls in which the nation's researchers can perform research without regard to geographical location—interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information from digital libraries.Tools and techniques for designing and running effective "collaboratories" among researchers with similar interests and a common language have been developed over the last 20 years and are well documented in the literature. Much of this hard-won knowledge regards process as much as it does technology.
In Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work, Johndan Johnson-Eilola describes a specific computer-supported collaboriatin space: The Smart Board. According to Johnson-Eilola, a “Smart Board system provides a 72-inch, rear projection, touchscreen, intelligent whiteboard surface for work” (79). In Datacloud, Johnson-Eilola asserts that “[w]e are attempting to understand how users move within information spaces, how users can exist within information spaces rather than merely gaze at them, and how information spaces must be shared with others rather than being private, lived within rather than simply visited” (82). He explains how the Smart Board system offers an information space that allows his students to engage in active collaboration. He makes three distinct claims regarding the functionality of the technology: 1) The Smart Board allows users to work with large amounts of information, 2) It offers an information space that invites active collaboration, 3) The work produced is often “dynamic and contingent” (82).
Johnson-Eilola further explains that with the Smart Board “…information work becom[es] a bodied experience” (81). Users have the opportunity to engage with—inhabit—the technology by direct manipulation. Moreover, this space allows for more than one user; essentially, it invites multiple users.
Workflow
How can work be made simpler, less prone to error, easier to learn? What role do diagrams and notations play in improving work output? What words do workers come to work already understanding, what do they misunderstand, and how can we get them using the same words to mean the same thing?Study of content management
Content management
Content management, or CM, is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. In recent times this information is typically referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content...
, enterprise taxonomy and the other core instructional capital
Instructional capital
Instructional capital is a term used in educational administration after the 1960s, to reflect capital resulting from investment in producing learning materials....
of the learning organization
Learning organization
A learning organization is the term given to a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. Learning organizations develop as a result of the pressures facing modern organizations and enables them to remain competitive in the business environment...
has become increasingly important due to ISO standards and the use of continuous improvement methods. Natural language and application commands tend to converge over time, becoming reflexive user interfaces. A concern that overlaps with OOPSLA
OOPSLA
OOPSLA is an annual ACM research conference. OOPSLA mainly takes place in the United States, while the sister conference of OOPSLA, ECOOP, is typically held in Europe...
.
Telework and human capital management
Where are the workers? Do we care? How do we coordinate them? How do we hire them, fire them, help them find the right thing to do next?The role of social network analysis and outsourcing
Outsourcing
Outsourcing is the process of contracting a business function to someone else.-Overview:The term outsourcing is used inconsistently but usually involves the contracting out of a business function - commonly one previously performed in-house - to an external provider...
services like e-lance, especially when combined in services like LinkedIn
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...
, is of particular concern in human capital
Human capital
Human capitalis the stock of competencies, knowledge and personality attributes embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. It is the attributes gained by a worker through education and experience...
management—again, especially in the software industry, where it is becoming more and more normal to run 24x7 globally distributed shops.
Major applications
Applications that imply certain kinds of collaboration include:- electronic meeting rooms or other live group support systems
- desktop conferencing and videoconferencingVideoconferencingVideoconferencing is the conduct of a videoconference by a set of telecommunication technologies which allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously...
systems, - large public wikis employing collaborative authorship
- weblogs ("blogs") as small-group collaboration tools, along with e-mail, text-chat
- SMS messaging, audio and video chat, audio and video "podcasting"
- the "blogosphere" - weblogs as large-scale collaboration tools
- web-broadcast syndication tools (RSS and Atom)
- web-broadcast aggregation tools (automated notification, clipping services, filtering, weighting)
Related fields
Related fields are collaborative product developmentCollaborative Product Development
Collaborative product development is a business strategy, work process and collection of software applications that facilitates different organizations to work together on the development of a product...
, CAD
Computer-aided design
Computer-aided design , also known as computer-aided design and drafting , is the use of computer technology for the process of design and design-documentation. Computer Aided Drafting describes the process of drafting with a computer...
/CAM
Computer-aided manufacturing
Computer-aided manufacturing is the use of computer software to control machine tools and related machinery in the manufacturing of workpieces. This is not the only definition for CAM, but it is the most common; CAM may also refer to the use of a computer to assist in all operations of a...
, computer-aided software engineering
Computer-aided software engineering
Computer-aided software engineering is the scientific application of a set of tools and methods to a software system which is meant to result in high-quality, defect-free, and maintainable software products...
(CASE), concurrent engineering, workflow management, distance learning, telemedicine
Telemedicine
Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities...
, medical CSCW
Medical CSCW
The global healthcare industry is charging ahead on the path to practice-wide and nation-wide computerization on the heals of exciting developments in electronic health record, medical imaging, and ubiquitous computing fields...
and the real-time network conferences called MUD
MUD
A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...
s (after "multi-user dungeons," although they are now used for more than game-playing).
See also
- Computer supported cooperative workComputer supported cooperative workThe term computer-supported cooperative work was first coined by Irene Greif and Paul M. Cashman in 1984, at a workshop attended by individuals interested in using technology to support people in their work. At about this same time, in 1987 Dr...
- Computer-supported collaborative learningComputer-supported collaborative learningComputer-supported collaborative learning is a pedagogical approach wherein learning takes place via social interaction using a computer or through the Internet. This kind of learning is characterized by the sharing and construction of knowledge among participants using technology as their primary...
- Collaborative softwareCollaborative softwareCollaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...
- Collaborative work systems
- Collaborative information seekingCollaborative information seekingCollaborative information seeking is a field of research that involves studying situations, motivations, and methods for people working in collaborative groups for information seeking projects, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. Such projects often involve information...
- Integrated collaboration environmentIntegrated Collaboration EnvironmentAn integrated collaboration environment is an environment in which a virtual team do their work. Such environments allow companies to realize a number of competitive advantages by using their existing computers and network infrastructure for group and personal collaboration...
- List of collaborative software
- List of project management software
- Mass collaborationMass collaborationMass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature...
- Toolkits for User InnovationToolkits for User InnovationToolkits for user innovation allow manufacturers to " abandon their attempts to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferring need-related aspects of product and service development to users along with an appropriate toolkit"...
- Smart contractsSmart contractsSmart contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, or that obviate the need for a contractual clause. Smart contracts usually also have a user interface and often emulate the logic of contractual clauses...
- Douglas EngelbartDouglas EngelbartDouglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
- Wicked problemWicked problem"Wicked problem" is a phrase originally used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve...
External links
- MetaCollab.net - Collaboration & technology - help contribute to a free collaborative encycolopedia on collaboration.
- SPARC - Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory.
- Science Of Collaboratories - Science of Collaboratories Project Home, with links to over 100 specific collaboratories
- Paul Resnick - Professor Paul Resnick's home page ( papers on SocioTechnical Capital, reputation systems, ride share coordination services, recommender systems, collaborative filtering, social filtering).
- Reticula - Weblogs, Wikis, and Public Health Today. News, professional activities, and academic research.
- Fifteen Charlie - A weblog about the policy discipline of emergency preparedness and response. (This is just one example of a massive, multi-level, dynamic, ad hoc, politicized, life-and-death, computer-supported coordination and collaboration task. Question: What changes to the computing infrastructure might make this work better?).
- US National Health Information Network News about and links into the US NHIN and efforts to build a nationwide virtual Electronic Health Record to support and facilitate electronic collaboration between clinicians, hospitals, patients, social work, and public health.
- Political Blogosphere - The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog, Adamic L. and Glance N., HP Labs, 2005. ("In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities.")
- http://www.enolagaia.com/UMUArchive/CSCWLitGuide.html#CoreLit - CSCW and Groupware Literature Guide: Randy's Reviews, Recommendations, and (Optional) Referrals.