Daniel G. Bobrow, Bob Cheslow, Elizabeth Churchill, Les Nelson, Jack Whalen, (2005) Conversation Support in a Collaboration Space for a Distributed Workgroup

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I found your position paper on CoLabSpace quite intriguing. It's interesting that you said the conversation and information exchange capabilities "that appeared to be useful in each case were broadly similar" (i.e. for the quality engineers, field workers doing ethnographic studies, and technical researchers). Since you haven't yet fielded CoLabSpace, I was wondering what prior work led you to this conclusion? Where I can find out more? I found your list of five capabilities (activity awareness, observation sharing, idea generation, task and resource planning, and group coordination) to be interesting as well, and would like to know where I can
learn more about how you decided upon these five in particular.

Our work on reinventing team rooms (a project we're now calling "ActivitySpaces") is somewhat related: We take the position that team rooms should shift their conventional focus on standing "teams" to a focus on what participants are trying to accomplish together, i.e. our team rooms are also "activity aware" and, in fact, are activity-centric. Our work also places great emphasis on searchable, highly filterable logs (in our case, our "Events Log" automatically records state changes relating to People, Tasks, and Artifacts, which are key elements of our system).

I'm looking forward to seeing/hearing more details about CoLabSpace at the workshop and in the months to come!

(Comment by SusanneHupfer)

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It seems that CoLabSpace, like many other systems we're presenting here, is an example of communication tool bricolage. "Bricolage" is a French term meaning "cobbling together", and has positive connotations of ingenuity and innovativeness. CoLabSpace, like Deme, Everything2, wiki, and I-DIAG, all seem to be systems that cobble together other known communication tools into an interesting package and see what happens.

I mention this because it's sort of an interesting phenomenon, maybe a transition in the way we're looking communication as a means for accomplishing other tasks. What does it mean that a bunch of us are now combining chat, calendaring, CVS, and shared file storage together to make new systems? An interesting set of experiments (definitely not suggesting this for your group) would be to run several CoLabSpaces with different tools plugged in and out on several similar groups. How does the system work without a feedback loop? Is the data store the only necessary function? I've been doing some work with SourceForge, which has a similar set of tools, and it's been interesting to see what people use and don't use. For example, it seems that older more inculcated technologies trump features in a system like this. Rather than message within the system, people will email. I'm not sure this is universally true, but it does have some design implications if there is even a weak universality to that tendency.

(Comment by CliffLampe)


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