Computer-Supported Collaborative Work

Reconsidering Place and Time

Traditionally, having a meeting has meant gathering people in the same location at the same time. Sometimes that's the case with CSCW, but it does not have to be. With computer technology, the issues of time and place are no longer constraints. If everyone interacts at the same time, the meeting is synchronous. Asynchronous meetings, in contrast, don't resemble what most people think of when they think of meetings. The interaction among participants do not occur [Page 90]simultaneously; instead, people participate on the task when they can, whether anybody else in the group is currently doing so or not. Just as the time element has become more flexible with CSCW, so too has meeting location. Computer technology can support workers at different locations (distributed meetings) as well as the more traditional meetings in which people are in the same location (collocated meetings). They can even allow workers to attend multiple meetings simultaneously.

CSCW can be classified along the dimensions of place and time to create four different types of collaborations. Same place/same time (SPST) efforts look most like a traditional face-to-face meeting. Different place/same time (DPST) meetings require participants to coordinate schedules just as with traditional meetings, but they can literally be anywhere in the world. Same place/different time (SPDT) means that people ultimately find themselves in a common location, but not simultaneously. In different place/different time (DPDT) projects, people on opposite sides of the world can interact without having to worry about time zone differences, working outside normal business hours, or how to get to a particular location.

Some analysts take things further and add a fifth type of collaboration: any place, any time (APAT). Wireless technologies let people send and receive messages no matter where they are; equipped with laptops, they are ready to become immersed in a task whenever the need arises.

Groupware: The Enabler of CSCW

Groupware refers to any application/technology supporting multiple users in their quest to collaborate on a task. The groupware concept is the brainchild of Douglas Engelbart—the same man who invented the mouse and pioneered the commercial implementation of hypertext. Though Englebart experimented with groupware technologies in the 1960s, the term groupware was not used until the 1980s. Designed to facilitate human-human communication, the best groupware maximizes effective interaction among group members without introducing much technological interference. Many forms of groupware are available; one of the most famous examples is Lotus Notes. Four commonly used types of applications are:

Computer (or Data) Conferencing. Computer conferencing or data communication can take several forms. Some, such as chat rooms, operate in real time and are STDP. Others, including electronic mail (email), bulletin-board software, and discussion groups, are asynchronous (DTSP, DTDP, ATAP).

Group Calendaring and Scheduling. These applications help groups organize, prioritize, order, and assign tasks. They can facilitate anything from simple meeting agendas to coordinating the completion of time-sensitive, interdependent, complex, multi-stage processes. They can take any time/place configuration.

...