Designing to support adversarial collaboration

We investigate the phenomenon of adversarial collaboration, through field studies of a legal firm. Adversarial collaboration requires that people with opposing goals come to agreement, usually producing a shared product that reflects the interests of the adversarial parties. Adversarial collaboration is characterized by secrecy, advocacy and discovery. To support this activity, software should provide flexible, selective sharing of awareness and access. These requirements contrast with conventional shared resource and awareness systems, which tend to assume cooperative collaboration, characterized by open processes and static membership lists. We illustrate these ideas in a redesign of our PeopleFlow research prototype. Keywords Design, adversarial collaboration, cooperative collaboration, collaborative writing, collaborative editing, documents, lawyers, privacy, secrecy.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: CSCW
• Authors: Andrew L. Cohen, Debra Cash, Michael J. Muller
• Keywords: Adversarial Collaboration, Adversarial Parties, Cooperative Collaboration, CSCW 2000, Social Sciences