TheInternet plays an important role as a means for world wide social contact. The establishment and maintenance of social and group relationships within electronic worlds require social norms and behavioral conventions as in the real world. This article investigates some of the available electronic media: e-mail, mailing lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, and multiuser dungeons or multiuser domains (MUDs). Peculiarities of the media are analyzed through studying the documented behavioral norms and social conventions. We look at desired behavior, disruptive behavior, and sanction mechanisms. A conclusion that may be drawn is that within these virtual environments, explicitly documented norms and conventions play an underlying role in how individuals behave in addition to what type of behavior they expect from others.

This paper describes a cooperative design approach and the experiences collected when applying this approach for developing and introducing a groupware system for the support of collaborative document processing in a geographically distributed ministerial environment. Methods were developed for the elicitation and analysis of explicit and tacit user requirements in work practice. The combination of these methods facilitated a mutual learning process between users and designers. These methods include interviews, laboratory workshops, user and designer workshops, as well as mediation by user advocates who explore users' needs during regular site visits. A portrait of the various methods is given, followed by a description of the experiences with the various types of interactions between the users and design team. This is accomplished with a report from system usage and implications these design methods had on system design.

ti this paper, we present experiences from long-term groupware developmen~introduction and use in an organization.We report lessons learned concerning how a complex design process operates and how its components interac~Our experiences suggest that the processes of requirement analysis, system developmen~and user support need to fac~tate the mer=tig of individud work patterns into congruent system usage.We confirm tbe chm=tig nature of groupwae use by reporting empirical restits descnbmg different learning phases.Ke~ords Cooperative desi~gn,user advocacy, groupware requirements, group work, system inwoduction, prototyping.This paper begins with a description showing how coordination with groupware use is related to the process of group developmen~We then outiine our particular design approach explaining how we tried to achieve a common understanding between tie design team and users, and how we tried to account for user group developmen~ h the foUowing section we present empirical results on the actual use of the system in the work setting, illustrating how tbe group stived to achieve congruent conventions.*POL~e~is funded by

This paper proposes collaborative workspaces as an electronic environment for time deferred team-like cooperation.The design requirements are derived from an investigation of work practices employing simple collaborative workspaces in ministerial units.In addition to facilities for sharing of material among a dedicated group, a collaborative workspace needs to provide appropriate behavior and awareness information to support cooperation.A concept for the technical realization proposes CSCW enablers to allow flexible adaptation of collaborative workspaces to different purposes and to changing user needs.

S.115-142