Computer-supported collaboration

Computer-supported collaboration (CSC) research focuses on technology that affect groups, organizations communities and societies, e.g. voice mail, text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working relationships. As net technology increasingly supported a wide range of recreational and social activities, consumer markets expanded the user base, more and more people were able to connect online to create what researchers have called a Computer Supported Cooperative World which includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music" (from CSCW 2004).

Scope of the field

Focused on output

The subfield computer-mediated communication deals specifically with how humans use "computers" (or digital media) to form, support and maintain relationships with others (social uses), regulate information flow (instructional uses), and make decisions (including major financial and political ones). It does not focus on common work products or other "collaboration" but rather on "meeting" itself, and on trust. By contrast CSC is focused on the output not the character or emotional consequences of meetings or relationships. The difference between "communication" and "collaboration".

Focused on contracts and rendezvous

Unlike communication research which focuses on trust, computer science which focuses on truth and logic, CSC focuses on cooperation and collaboration and decision making theory, which are more concerned with rendezvous and contract. For instance, auctions and market systems, which rely on bid and ask relationships, are studied as part of CSC not usually as part of communication.

The term CSC emerged in the 1990s to replace the terms workgroup computing (which emphasizes technology over the work being supported and seems to restrict inquiry to small organizational units) or groupware (which became a commercial buzzword and was used to describe many badly designed systems) and computer supported cooperative work (the name of a conference) seems only to address research into experimental systems and the nature of workplaces and organizations doing "work" as opposed to play or war).

Collaboration is not software

Two different types of software are sometimes differentiated

• social software which produces social ties as its primary output, e.g. a [social network servic
• collaborative software which produces a collaborative deliverable, e.g. a political wiki producing a platform

Base technologies like netnews, email, chat and wiki could be described as either "social" or "collaborative". Those who say "social" seem to focus on so-called "virtual community" while those who say "collaborative" seem to be more concerned with content management and the actual output. While software may be designed to achieve closer social ties or specific deliverables, it is hard to support collaboration without also enabling relationships to form, and hard to support a social interaction without some kind of shared co-authored works.

May include games

Accordingly, the differentiation between social and collaborative software may also be stated as that between "play" and "work". Some theorists hold that a play ethic should apply, and that work must become more game-like or play-like in order to make using computers a more comfortable experience. The study of MUDs and MMRPGs in the 1980s and 1990s led many to this conclusion which is now not controversial.

True multi-player computer games can be considered a simple form of collaboration, but only a few theorists include this as part of CSC.

Basic tasks

Tasks undertaken in this field resemble those of any social science, but with a special focus on systems integration and groups:

• Discover the multidisciplinary nature of computer supported cooperative work
• Discuss experiences with technologies that support communication, collaboration, and coordination
• Understand behavioral, social, and organizational challenges to developing and using these technologies
• Learn successful development and usage approaches
• Anticipate future trends in technology use and global social impacts
• Analyze CMC systems and interaction via social software
• Design CMC systems to facilitate desirable outcomes
• Apply CMC analysis and visualization tools
• Find uses of video conferencing, if any
• Apply social ergonomics
• Work environment design and A/V considerations
• Improve audio and video encoding - from grainy thumbnails to HD
• Improve and integrate common video conferencing tools
• Analyze work processes, e.g. with the support of video monitoring
• Deploy and evaluate systems for use in particular work contexts
• Take theoretical perspectives to fieldwork, dealing with social complexity.
• Performing observational studies
• Work in commercial and industrial settings, domestic environments and public spaces

Problems of method, communication and comprehension in collaborations between ethnographer and system developer are also of special concern.

CSCW 2004 tutorials listed all of the above as desirable skills to know.

Major applications

Applications that imply certain kinds of collaboration include:

• electronic meeting rooms or other live group support systems
• desktop conferencing and videoconferencing systems,
• large public wikis employing collaborative authorship
• weblogs ("blogs") as small-group collaboration tools, along with e-mail, text-chat
• SMS messaging, audio and video chat, audio and video "podcasting"
• the "blogosphere" - weblogs as large-scale collaboration tools
• web-broadcast syndication tools (RSS and Atom)
• web-broadcast aggregation tools (automated notification, clipping services, filtering, weighting)

External links

• AIDS Research - International AIDS Research Collaboratory
• MetaCollab.net - Collaboration & technology - help contribute to a free collaborative encycolopedia on collaboration.
• University of Michigan School of Information - Technology-Mediated Collaboration academic research.
• SPARC - Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory.
• Science Of Collaboratories - Science of Collaboratories Project Home, with links to over 100 specific collaboratories
• Paul Resnick - Professor Paul Resnick's home page ( papers on SocioTechnical Capital, reputation systems, ride share coordination services, recommender systems, collaborative filtering, social filtering).
• Reticula - Weblogs, Wikis, and Public Health Today. News, professional activities, and academic research.
• Fifteen Charlie - A weblog about the policy discipline of emergency preparedness and response. (This is just one example of a massive, multi-level, dynamic, ad hoc, politicized, life-and-death, computer-supported cooordination and collaboration task. Question: What changes to the computing infrastructure might make this work better?).
• US National Health Information Network News about and links into the US NHIN and efforts to build a nationwide virtual Electronic Health Record to support and facilitate electronic collaboration between clinicians, hospitals, patients, social work, and public health.
• Political Blogosphere - The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog, Adamic L. and Glance N., HP Labs, 2005. ("In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities.")

Further Reading

For further related information on the topic please refer to Wikipedia Computer-supported_collaboration