Mind the gap! Towards a unified view of CSCW

1. Mind the gap! Towards a unified view of CSCW By Kjeld Schmidt and Carla Simone, 2000

2. The gap in CSCW TWO diverging strategies in CSCW: 1) Regulate coordinative interaction - enable cooperative ensembles to perform more reliably and efficiently 2) Shared workspace - …through which actors can interact directly - by generic competences (talking, gesturing, etc.) - without other restraints than bandwidth, latency, etc.

3. Regulating interaction Many very different systems Here: How do they deal with the requirement of flexibility that arises from the changing need of the cooperative work setting? Two general approaches 

4. Regulating interaction a) Language that incorporates an ontology of cooperation - structured conversation “flexibility is thus claimed to be achieved by means of a universal language which provides a set of primitives derived from the ontology” b) Selecting a suitable metaphor for modeling cooperative work - usually focus on one type of workflow (tasks, documents or communication) “Flexibility is achieved by providing primitives for manipulating the flow, for example by allowing the flow to be defined dynamically and incrementally”

5. Regulating interaction • the two approaches… • - doubts about the conceptual validity • - not grounded in empirical studies • Empirical studies shows the ‘physical’ nature of cooperation. This prescribes focus on the artifacts themselves instead of the more abstract notion of flows • An alternative ‘lightweight’ approach • integration of different communication media • flexible applications • simplistic in support of cooridnation

6. Mediating interaction • No undue restrictions • Events are unique, ad hoc improvisation • Extensive reliance on mutual awareness • Media spaces. the goal is to amplify the physical capabilities of actors irrespective of location and movement • Shared object spaces. virtual space is populated by objects with cooperational capabilities

7. Mediating interaction Researchers & developers works on infrastructures that provide openness, flexibility, integration of different basic functions etc. This has led to significant progress in CSCW, but has also led to doubts whether coordination technologies can solve specific problems in cooperative work settings. The gap between the need for sophisticated applications and the provided technology has increased. Flexibility must controlled by the user and expressed at the semantic level of articulation work

8. Mediating interaction • The gap in CSCW: • systems that restrict coordinative interaction to a priori models or to a set of narrow and incongruent metaphors. • radically flexible systems that leaves it to the users to cope with the complexity of coordinating their activities. • In cooperative work in the real word, both strategies are used interchangeably

9. The seamlessness of articulation work Articulation: “ To prevent interdependent and yet distributed activities from degenerating into chaos, the cooperative effort must be coordinated, aligned, integrated, meshed – in short articulated” The fundamental way to articulate distributed activities is to facilitate the generation of mutual awareness

10. Articulation work – Mutual awareness “Exploiting what is there for the taking” in a non-intrusive fashion (as opposed to asking, negotiating, ordering) A change of the common field of work emit signals that may be perceived by other actors. They may also be able to perceive the field of work in its entirety. From his awareness, one may develop a rudimentory awareness on others activities, and maybe infer the plans and intentions of colleagues. When sharing the same (physical or media) space, they may also perceive each others bodily conduct. Activities through which align their activities may be perceived in the same way.

11. Articulation work – Mutual awareness Research on mutual awareness has established that: In a joint effort, actors typically modulate their own activities to provide their colleagues with cues and information pertinent to their being aware of these activities. Actors continually monitor or scan the activities of others.

12. AW - Coordinative artifacts and protocols Artifacts for coordination and protocols for how these artifacts are to be used. Artifacts:- templates (specify properties of the result) - maps (specify interdependencies) - scripts (specify a protocol of interaction) Protocol: - offers a limited, predetermined set of actions that are considered safe, secure, advisable, etc. - excluding actions that are considered unsafe, etc. - reduces the complexity of coordinating activities. Protocols are deliberately under-specified to: - factors that are immaterial to the purpose - factors that can be more efficiently be left unspecified. “No representation of the world is either complete or permanent”.

13. AW – articulation work is seamless The situated activity inherent in protocol execution requires actors’ mutual awareness with respect to the state of the field of work, of the cooperating ensemble, of the protocol itself and of intersecting protocols. The combined use of coordinative protocols and mutual awareness allows for ‘precomputation’ without imposing undue rigidity to the flow of actions.

14. Towards integrated support of AW A language for defining, specifying and executing ‘ coordination mechanisms (Ariadne) Mutual awareness: a set of linguistic features (AW-manager) Interoperability of different ‘coordination mechanisms’ (Reconciler)

15. Towards integrated support of AW - semantic level Languages that in precisely the same way allows users to express salient categories of articulation work and rules for combining them

16. Towards integrated support of AW - integration Categories constituting the protocol notify the AW-Manager of the awareness triggers. AW-Manager handles the awareness space and the execution of the scripts associated to those triggers. AW-Manager returns the awareness information to the appropriate categories. This gives artificial entities mutual awareness capabilities.

17. Towards integrated support of AW - distributedness Mutual awareness functionalities are integrated with respect to composite applications which evolve in an autonomous way. ‘interoperability raisd at the semantic level of articulation work’ ‘Contextual Information Service’ and ‘Reconciler’ provide contextual information.

18. Conclusion • User interfaces can become a real bottleneck to any reasonable evolution of coordination technologies • screen dimensions • graphical metaphors (windows, buttons etc.) • Achievements are presently more at the architectural level than at the level of a set of functionalities that can be efficiently and flexibly used.