This survey characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordination from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations research, economics, linguistics, and psychology.A key insight of the framework presented here is that coordination can be seen as the process of managing dependencies among activities. Further progress, therefore, should be possible by characterizing different kinds of dependencies and identifying the coordination processes that can be used to manage them. A variety of processes are analyzed from this perspective, and commonalities across disciplines are identified. Processes analyzed include those for managing shared resources, producer/consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and task/subtask dependencies.Section 3 summarizes ways of applying a coordination perspective in three different domains:(1) understanding the effects of information technology on human organizations and markets, (2) designing cooperative work tools, and (3) designing distributed and parallel computer systems. In the final section, elements of a research agenda in this new area are briefly outlined.

/pdf/the-interdisciplinary-study-of-coordination-22jsxamy1h.pdf

The interdisciplinary study of coordination

Groupware reflects a change in emphasis from using the computer to solve problems to using the computer to facilitate human interaction. This article describes categories and examples of groupware and discusses some underlying research and development issues. GROVE, a novel group editor, is explained in some detail as a salient groupware example

/pdf/groupware-some-issues-and-experiences-3o63d5bi23.pdf

Groupware: some issues and experiences

Ubiquitous computing is the method of enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user. Since we started this work at Xerox PARC in 1988, a number of researchers around the world have begun to work in the ubiquitous computing framework. This paper explains what is new and different about the computer science in ubiquitous computing. It starts with a brief overview of ubiquitous computing, and then elaborates through a series of examples drawn from various subdisciplines of computer science: hardware components (e.g. chips), network protocols, interaction substrates (e.g. software for screens and pens), applications, privacy, and computational methods. Ubiquitous computing offers a framework for new and exciting research across the spectrum of computer science.

/pdf/some-computer-science-issues-in-ubiquitous-computing-59kpy3d30s.pdf

Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing

Electronic meeting systems

Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise for improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware. However, there is little principled information available about awareness that can be used by groupware designers. In this article, we develop a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of aiding groupware design, focusing on one kind of group awareness called i>workspace awareness. We focus on how small groups perform generation and execution tasks in medium-sized shared workspaces – tasks where group members frequently shift between individual and shared activities during the work session. We have built a three-part framework that examines the concept of workspace awareness and that helps designers understand the concept for purposes of designing awareness support in groupware. The framework sets out elements of knowledge that make up workspace awareness, perceptual mechanisms used to maintain awareness, and the ways that people use workspace awareness in collaboration. The framework also organizes previous research on awareness and extends it to provide designers with a vocabulary and a set of ground rules for analysing work situations, for comparing awareness devices, and for explaining evaluation results. The basic structure of the theory can be used to describe other kinds of awareness that are important to the usability of groupware.

http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/grouplab/uploads/Publications/Publications/2002-DescriptiveFramework.JCSCW.pdf

A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware

Although individual use of computers is fairly widespread, in meetings we tend to leave them behind. At Xerox PARC, an experimental meeting room called the Colab has been created to study computer support of collaborative problem solving in face-to-face meetings. The long-term goal is to understand how to build computer tools to make meetings more effective.

Beyond the chalkboard: computer support for collaboration and problem solving in meetings

WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) is a foundational abstraction for multi-user interfaces that expresses many of the characteristics of a chalkboard in face-to-face meetings. In its strictest interpretation, it means that everyone can see the same written information and also where anyone else is pointing. We present several examples of multi-user interfaces that start from the WYSIWIS abstraction. In our attempts to build software support for collaboration in meetings, we have discovered that WYSIWIS is at once crucial and too inflexible in its strictest sense. WYSIWIS must be relaxed for all our software tools to better accommodate important interactions in meetings. Relaxations to WYSIWIS are characterized in terms of constraints on its four key dimensions: display space, time of display, subgroup population, and congruence of view.

WYSIWIS revised: early experiences with multi-user interfaces

Cognoter is a program helps a cooperating group of people to organizing their thoughts for a presentation, e.g., a paper or talk. It is designed for use in the Colab, an experimental laboratory created at Xerox PARC to study computer support of cooperative real-time group problem-solving. Cognoter provides a multi-user interface and a structured meeting process. An annotated graph of ideas is built up by the group in three stages: brainstorming for idea generation, ordering for idea organization, and evaluation for choosing what will be finally be presented. Interesting aspects of Cognoter include direct spatial manipulation of ideas and their order relationships, support of parallel activity, and incremental progress toward a total ordering of ideas.

Gregg Foster

Papers

Beyond the chalkboard: computer support for collaboration and problem solving in meetings

WYSIWIS revised: early experiences with multi-user interfaces

Cognoter: theory and practice of a colab-orative tool

Beyond the chalkboard: computer support for collaboration and problem solving in meetings