Computer

Supported
Co-operative Work

Edited by

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon
Université Paris-Sud, France

JOHN WILEY AND SONS

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel.
Computer supported co-operative work / Michel Beaudouin-Lafon
p. c. — (Trends in software ; 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-96736-X (alk. paper)
1. Teams in the workplace — Computer networks. I. Title
II. Series.
HD66.2.B4 1999
658.4'02 — dc21 98-42699
CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-471-96736-X

Produced from Postscript files supplied by the author.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles, Guildford, UK.
This book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable
forestry, in which at least two trees are planted for each tree used in paper production.
Contents

Series Editor’s Preface ix

Preface xi

List of Authors xv

1 Designing Groupware Applications:

A Work-Centered Design Approach 1
K. Ehrlich
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Requirements 4
1.3 Design 14
1.4 Deployment and Adoption of the Application 18
1.5 Case Study: TeamRoom 20
1.6 Summary 23
Acknowledgements 24
References 24

2 Workflow Technology 29
C.A. Ellis
2.1 Overview 29
2.2 Workflow Concepts and Architecture 30
2.3 Historical Perspective and Related Work 36
2.4 Workflow Models and Modeling 38
2.5 Workflow Meta-Model 40
2.6 Example Systems 43
2.7 Research Directions and Issues 46
2.8 Summary 51
References 51
vi CONTENTS

3 Media Spaces: Environments for Informal

Multimedia Interaction 55
W.E. Mackay
3.1 Introduction 55
3.2 Early Media Spaces 57
3.3 RAVE: EuroPARC’s Media Space 58
3.4 Other Major Media Spaces 67
3.5 WAVE: A Detailed Case Study 71
3.6 Ethical Issues 77
3.7 Conclusion 79
Acknowledgements 79
References 79

4 Integration of Shared Workspace and

Interpersonal Space for Remote Collaboration 83
H. Ishii
4.1 Introduction 83
4.2 TeamWorkStation-1 and Seamless Shared Workspaces 86
4.3 TeamWorkStation-2 for N-ISDN 89
4.4 Seamless Integration of Interpersonal Space and Shared Workspace 92
4.5 Design of ClearBoard-1 93
4.6 Design of ClearBoard-2 95
4.7 Summary and Future Work 97
Acknowledgements 99
References 100

5 Group Editors 103

A. Prakash
5.1 Introduction 103
5.2 Examples of Group Editors 104
5.3 Group Editor Architecture 107
5.4 Concurrency Control 109
5.5 Undo in a Group Editor 117
5.6 Supporting Collaboration Awareness 123
5.7 Design of Document Structure 126
5.8 Other Design Issues 127
5.9 Future Work 131
References 131

6 Groupware Toolkits for Synchronous Work 135

S. Greenberg and M. Roseman
6.1 Introduction 135
CONTENTS vii

6.2 Run-Time Architectures 136

6.3 Programming Abstractions 144
6.4 Groupware Widgets 150
6.5 Session Management 158
6.6 Conclusion 161
Acknowledgements 164
References 164

7 Architectures for Collaborative Applications 169

P. Dewan
7.1 Introduction 169
7.2 Collaboration Model 170
7.3 Generic Architecture 172
7.4 Design Space 174
7.5 External Modules 185
7.6 Rules 187
7.7 Classifying Existing Systems 188
7.8 Conclusions and Future Work 189
Acknowledgements 191
References 191

8 Software Infrastructures 195

P. Dourish
8.1 Introduction 195
8.2 Infrastructure Elements in CSCW 196
8.3 Communication 199
8.4 Coordination 202
8.5 Storage 205
8.6 Infrastructure and Specialization 207
8.7 Summary 216
Acknowledgements 217
References 217

9 Expanding the Role of Formal Methods in CSCW 221

C. Johnson
9.1 Introduction 221
9.2 Starting From the Ground Up: The Application of Formal Methods to CSCW 228
9.3 Dialogue Sequences 230
9.4 Formalizing the Presentation of CSCW Systems 236
9.5 Working Environments 243
9.6 Representing Workstation Layout 245
9.7 Using Ergonomic Guidelines to Inform CSCW Design 246
9.8 Prototyping 248
9.9 Conclusion 252
viii CONTENTS

References 254

Index 257
Series Editor’s Preface

During 1990, the twentieth anniversary of Software Practice and Experience, two special
issues (one on UNIX Tools and the other on the X Window System) were published. Each
issue contained a set of refereed papers related to a single topic; the issues appeared a short
time (roughly nine months) after the authors were invited to submit them. The positive ex-
perience with the special issues resulted in Trends in Software, a fast turn-around serial that
devotes each issue to a specific topic in the software field. As with the special issues of SP&E,
each issue of Trends will be edited by an authority in the area.
By collecting together a comprehensive set of papers on a single topic, Trends makes it
easy for readers to find a definitive overview of a given topic. By ensuring timely publication,
Trends guarantees readers that the information presented captures the state of the art. The
collection of papers will be of practical value to software designers, researchers, practitioners
and users in that field.
Papers in each issue of Trends are solicited by a guest editor who is responsible for solicit-
ing them and ensuring that the selected papers span the topic. The guest editor then subjects
each paper to the rigorous peer review expected in any archival journal. As much as possible,
electronic communication (e.g. electronic mail) is used as the primary means of communi-
cation between the series editor, members of the editorial board, guest editor, authors, and
referees. A style document and macro package is available to reduce the turn-around time by
enabling authors to submit papers in camera-ready form. Papers are exchanged electronically
in an immediately printable format.
Trends will appear roughly twice a year. We now have issues in interactive data visualization
techniques and computer supported cooperative work. Topics to be covered in forthcoming
issues include other novel aspects of software.
The editorial board encourages readers to submit suggestions and comment. You may send
them via electronic mail to [email protected] or by postal mail to the address given
below.
I would like to thank the editorial board as well as the staff at John Wiley for their help in
making each issue of Trends a reality.

Balachander Krishnamurthy
Room D-229
AT&T Labs–Research
180 Park Avenue
Florham Park NJ 07932
USA
Preface

Computer Supported Cooperative Work, or CSCW, is a rapidly growing multi-disciplinary

field. As personal workstations get more powerful and as networks get faster and wider, the
stage seems to be set for using computers not only to help accomplish our everyday, personal
tasks but also to help us communicate and work with others. Indeed, group activities occupy a
large amount of our time: meetings, telephone calls, mail (electronic or not), but also informal
encounters in corridors, coordination with secretaries, team workers or managers, etc. In fact,
work is so much group work that it is surprising to see how poorly computer systems support
group activities. For example, many documents (such as this book) are created by multiple
authors but yet no commercial tool currently allows a group of authors to create such shared
documents as easily as one can create a single-author document. We have all experienced
the nightmares of multiple copies being edited in parallel, format conversion, mail and file
transfers, etc.
CSCW is not recent. Back in the late 1960s, Doug Engelbart created the NLS/Augment
system that featured most of the functions that today’s systems are trying to implement
such as real-time shared editing of outlines, shared annotations of documents, and video-
conferencing. The field really emerged in the 1980s and has been growing since then, boosted
in the recent years by the explosion of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Web itself is
not a very collaborative system: pages can be easily published but it is impossible (or very dif-
ficult) to share them, e.g. to know when someone is reading a particular page or when a page
has been modified. The range and complexity of the problems to solve to support cooperative
activities is rapidly overwhelming: data sharing, concurrency control, conflict management,
access control, performance, reliability, the list goes on.
A large part of this book is devoted to the exploration of these problems and the state of
the art of their solutions. In fact, CSCW is challenging most of the assumptions that were
explicitly or implicitly embodied in the design of our current computer systems. CSCW tools,
or groupware, are by nature distributed and interactive. To succeed in the marketplace, they
must be safe (authentication), interoperable (from network protocols to operating systems and
GUI platforms), fault-tolerant and robust (you don’t want to be slowed down or loose your
data if another participant in the session uses a slow connection or experiences a crash).
In addition to these technical difficulties, there is another, maybe harder, problem in imple-
menting groupware: people. For a medium to work, there must be an audience that accepts
using it. Usability issues have stressed the need to take the users into account when designing,
developing and evaluating an interactive software. For groupware, usability issues go beyond
the now well-understood (if not always well-applied) methods from psychology and design.
They involve social sciences to understand how people work together, how an organization
imposes and/or adapts to the work practices of its workers, etc. In many CSCW projects,
xii PREFACE

ethnographic studies have been conducted to better understand the nature of the problem and
the possible solutions. A large body of the research work in CSCW is conducted by social sci-
entists, often within multidisciplinary teams. Computer scientists often ignore or look down
upon this aspect of CSCW and almost always misunderstand it. User-centered design is es-
sential to ensure that computer scientists solve the right problems in the right way. Traditional
software works as soon as it “does the job”; Interactive software works better if it is easy to
use rather than if it has more functions; Groupware works only if it is compatible with the
work practices of its users.

Overview of the book

This book attempts to cover the broad field of CSCW and to give an overview of the history,
state of the art and research issues of this exciting field. It is divided into two parts: the first
part covers groupware tools while the second part covers tools for groupware.
The first chapter by Ehrlich focuses on a category of groupware for asynchronous group
work such as the well-known Lotus Notes. More importantly, it provides an in-depth analysis
and a set of recommendations to help design, develop and deploy groupware in an organiza-
tion. Ehrlich emphasizes that groupware is for group work and therefore all aspects of group
work must be well understood for the software to be accepted.
Chapter 2 by Ellis covers workflow systems. Since the 1960s, businesses have been con-
verting their manual or mechanical information systems into computerized systems. Workflow
systems go beyond traditional information systems by embodying a description of the work
processes of the organization. The system therefore can be proactive, e.g. by automatically
circulating documents or by reminding users of their duties when they are late. Ellis analyzes
the promises, realities and problems of this category of groupware.
Chapter 3 by Mackay describes media spaces, i.e. communication systems that combine
audio, video and computers to provide distant users with a means for social interaction and
informal communication. Unlike videoconferencing rooms which require reservations and
inevitably lead to formal meetings, media spaces attempt to broaden the bandwidth among
users in order to support “real-life” human communication. Mackay covers the underlying
design rationale of the existing systems and raises awareness on ethical and privacy issues of
groupware.
Chapter 4 by Ishii describes systems that allow small groups to work in a tightly-coupled
way at a distance, such as an instructor and a student or a group of designers. The chapter is
illustrated by a description of a series of prototypes developed by Ishii and his group. While
the prototypes are technically more and more complex, the chapter shows how the observation
of the type of group work that was to be supported leads from one prototype to the next.
Chapter 5 by Prakash covers shared editors, editors that can be used by several users simul-
taneously to edit, in real-time, a single document. It marks the division between the two parts
of the book: the concepts of shared editor are introduced and some examples are presented.
The chapter then goes into an in-depth description of the techniques used to implement shared
editors, focusing on issues such as managing the consistency between several copies of the
document being edited and implementing multi-user undo.
Chapter 6 by Greenberg and Roseman describes groupware toolkits. In the same spirit
as user interface toolkits, groupware toolkits provide programmers with predefined compo-
nents that help implement groupware tools. The chapter covers toolkits for real-time (or syn-
chronous) groupware, with components such as group widgets, awareness widgets, session
PREFACE xiii

managers, etc. Greenberg and Roseman use their own toolkit, GroupKit, to illustrate the de-
sign issues of such tools.
Chapter 7 by Dewan covers software architectures for CSCW. Since groupware applications
must interact, by definition, with several users, they are in general distributed over a network.
Dewan systematically examines the various ways in which an application can be decomposed
into modules, threads and processes and the many tradeoffs that the various solutions incur.
This leads to a set of measures for an architecture that help better understand this large design
space.
Chapter 8 by Dourish covers software infrastructures, i.e. the types of services that are
or could be provided by the operating system, network and other middleware to implement
groupware applications. Given the varying needs of groupware applications, Dourish presents
a particular approach, open implementation, as particularly promising since it combines flex-
ibility, performance and openness.
Chapter 9 by Johnson provides an original perspective on the role of formal methods in
CSCW, more particularly in the requirements phase of development. Johnson introduces sev-
eral formal notations and models and uses examples to show how they can be applied to
practical cases.
CSCW radically changes the status of the computer. Until now, the computer has been used
as a tool to solve problems. With CSCW, the computer/network is a medium: a means to
communicate with other human beings, a vector for information rather than a box that stores
and crunches data. If we look at the history of technology, new media have been much more
difficult to invent, create and operate than new tools. From this perspective, it is not surprising
that CSCW has not yet realized its full potential, even in the research community. I hope
this book will help readers to better understand the challenges and promises of CSCW and
encourage new developments both in research and in industry.

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon
Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique
Bâtiment 490
Université de Paris-Sud.
91 405 Orsay Cedex FRANCE
[email protected]
List of Authors

Prasun Dewan Paul Dourish

Department of Computer Science Xerox PARC
University of North Carolina 3333 Coyote Hill Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27599 Palo Alto, CA 94304
USA USA
[email protected] [email protected]

Kate Ehrlich Clarence Ellis

Lotus Development Corp. Department of Computer Science
55 Cambridge Parkway University of Colorado
Cambridge MA 02142 Boulder, CO 90309-0430
USA USA
kate [email protected] [email protected]

Saul Greenberg Hiroshi Ishii

Department of Computer Science MIT Media Laboratory
University of Calgary 20 Ames Street
Calgary, Alta T2N 1N4 Cambridge, MA 02139
CANADA USA
[email protected] [email protected]

Chris Johnson Wendy E. Mackay

Glasgow Interactive Systems Group Department of Computer Science
Department of Computer Science Aarhus University
University of Glasgow Aabogade 34
Glasgow G12 8QQ DK-8200 Aarhus N
SCOTLAND DENMARK
[email protected] [email protected]

Atul Prakash Mark Roseman

Department of EECS Department of Computer Science
University of Michigan University of Calgary
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2122 Calgary, Alta T2N 1N4
USA CANADA
[email protected] [email protected]