One-hundred days in an activity-centric collaboration environment based on shared objects

ABSTRACT

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is carefully poised between informal, ad hoc, easy-to-initiate collaborative tools, vs. more formal, structured, and high-overhead collaborative applications. Our approach focuses on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared objects with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed first look at data from the first 100 days of usage by 20 researchers and 13 interns, who both confirmed our hypotheses and surprised us by reinventing the technology in several ways.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications

Keywords:
CSCW, activity-centric collaboration, computer-mediated communication, synchronous/asynchronous collaboration, user study