This paper explores whether chance encounters which occur within the workplace can be reproduced within a virtual environment. Participants' interaction in the Forum Contact Space, a networked virtual world designed to support chance encounters, was ...

Micro-blogs, a relatively new phenomenon, provide a new communication channel for people to broadcast information that they likely would not share otherwise using existing channels (e.g., email, phone, IM, or weblogs). Micro-blogging has become popu-lar ...

Recent years have seen an increasing use of collaboratories in distributed scientific work. This study examines the role of collaboratories in informal scientific communication. Hypotheses relating to potential opportunities for informal communication ...

We briefly describe a system for forms-based workflow management that helps members of a software development team overcome geographical barriers to collaboration. Our system, called the Web Integrated Software Environment (WISE), is implemented as a ...

Over the last forty years, a number of audiovisual systems have been proposed to allow people to communicate over distance. However, although these systems have greatly improved in their ability to support formal meetings, they are still hardly usable ...

This paper introduces the concept of editable chat logs for shared workspace systems. In shared workspaces offering a chat for synchronous communication, editable chat logs allow to keep and archive transcripts of chat conversations as documents in the ...

NuggetMine is an intelligent groupware application that collaborates with a workgroup to increase information nugget sharing among the group. Information nuggets are small amounts of self-contained information, such as the URL of an interesting news ...

Three public spaces frequency used by members of a single organization who are distributed across different floors of two buildings were linked by constantly-running video and audio connections. We discuss the design of the system, including issues in ...

This article presents findings from a research study (Trace, 2004) that looked at a particular aspect of human information behavior: children's information creation in a classroom setting. In the portion of the study described here, naturalism and ethnomethodology ...

Collaborations over distance must contend with the loss of the rich, subtle interactions that co-located teams use to coordinate their work. Previous research has suggested that one consequence of this loss is that cross-site work will take longer than ...

We discuss findings from an ethnographic study of instant messaging (IM) in the workplace and its implications for media theory. We describe how instant messaging supports a variety of informal communication tasks. We document the affordances of IM that ...

The Forum is a collaborative working environment that consists of two shared spaces: a space for informal interaction (Contact Space), and a workspace for synchronous meetings using audioconferencing support (Meeting Space). It is designed to enable ...

Communication theories and technology have tended to focus on extended, formal meetings and have neglected a prevalent and vital form of workplace communication—namely, lightweight communication. Unlike formal, extended meetings, lightweight interaction ...

The evaluation of groupware systems is considered a complex activity, mainly due to the impact that this kind of tools could have in work practices, the multiples variables that influences the use and evaluation of them, as well as the expensive cost ...

Instant Messaging (IM) clients allow users to conduct multiple simultaneous conversations, which we term "concurrent IMs." In this study we investigate how adults manage concurrent IMs both in the workplace and within the context of a goal-directed, ...

This paper presents the preliminary results from an ongoing research project with the purpose to explore possible ways of using and benefiting from mobile technology for home-help service.It is based upon a field study of three Swedish home-help service ...