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Since my temperament draws me to groupware, I have read about and taught it, and tried many groupware programs. This has been interesting, but the only groupware that has really affected my work is electronic mail on wide-area networks. My “invisible college,” my colleagues, are not the people in the offices down the corridor, they are people on the Internet, many of whom I have never seen or spoken with.
Electronic social fields in bureaucracies
Advanced computer tools designed to facilitate collaboration in a common task or across functions have had a remarkably disappointing record of diffusion and adoption [16]. Technologies that are unresponsive to users needs will not find their markets. Groupware such as electronic mail, conferencing, and on-line editing, however, has an apparently natural affinity to the team and project work of salaried professional employees.
Update on National Science Foundation funding of the “Collaboratory”
NSF-funded collaboratories are experimental and empirical research environments in which domain scientist work with computer, communications, behavioral and social scientists to design systems, participate in collaborative science, and conduct experiments to evaluate and improve the systems. These research projects are concerned with distributed and collaborative research that requires intense reliance on wide-area networks and the Internet, to bring together instruments, laboratories and researchers.
Putting innovation to work: adoption strategies for multimedia communication systems
Multimedia communication systems promise better support for widely distributed workgroups. Their benefits for complex communication—problem-solving, negotiating, planning, and design —seem obvious, introducing appealing new technologies into the marketplace, however, can require years of Investment [13, 22]. In particular, finding productive uses for new systems takes time. Adoption strategies are needed to guide and accelerate the process.
This issue of Communications focuses on social and organizational influences governing collaborative uses of computers and communications. Here we review some of those influences from the perspectives of the risks involved.
Collaborative computing: collaboration first, computing second
These articles on Collaborative Computing will seem out of place to a number of readers from the computer science community. Interesting articles perhaps, but what do they have to do with computers? Where is the science—that is, where is the mathematics, or the code? What have these issues to do with everyday practice?
Shape the Future of Computing
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Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
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