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

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 highoverhead 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. Keywords CSCW, Computer-mediated communication, Activity-centric collaboration, synchronous/asynchronous collaboration, User study. ACM Classification Keywords H5.3. Group and organizational interfaces. H4.3. Communications applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Michael J. Muller, Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, Eric Wilcox, David R. Millen
• Keywords: ACM Classification Keywords, CHI 2004, Easy-to-initiate Collaborative Tools, Human Computer Interaction, Synchronous/asynchronous Collaboration