This paper traces the use of the concept 'community' by drawing attention to the ways in which it serves as an organizing principle within systems development. The data come from an ethnographic study of participants and their activities in the Water and Environmental Research Systems Network (WATERS). WATERS is a US National Science Foundation-funded observatory and cyberinfrastructure project intended to serve the heterogeneous scientific disciplines studying the water environment. We identify four vehicles by which WATERS participants sought to know the needs, conflicts and goals of their diverse communities: engaging in vernacular discussions; organizing community forums; implementing surveys; and requirements gathering. The paper concludes that the use of community in IT development projects is substantially divorced from its traditional meanings which emphasize collective moral orientations or shared affective ties; instead, within systems development, community has a closer meaning to a 'political constituency,' and is used as a short-hand for issues of inquiry, representation, inclusion and mandate.

Summary form only given. Research agencies in the United States and around the world are now arguing for a new round of investment in computing and networks, termed "cyber infrastructure," to enable even more ambitious collaboration at the scale of thousands to tens of thousands of participants. Technology to support collaboration on this order is emerging, such as computational grids, and is being deployed within worldwide scientific enterprises, including the next generation of high energy physics experiments at CERN. However, despite this progress, it remains unclear whether lessons about effective virtual collaboration, gained from the first generation of collaborative tools, are being applied to guide the evolution of what have been termed "virtual organizations." This highlights socio-technical factors that undermine the effectiveness of virtual work and focuses on the special challenges of successfully addressing these factors in the coming age of virtual organizations.

In designing information infrastructure participants are planning for the long-term. The notion of infrastructure evokes images beyond 'a proof of concept,' a 'prototype' or an isolated 'application'; it is intended to be a persistent, ubiquitous and reliable environment. However, in implementing such projects participants confront multiple difficulties such as securing sustained funding, supporting maintenance and integrating new technologies.

Issues of scaling are critical when an infrastructure is trying to grow. Systems that worked well with smaller numbers or particular types of users must change to meet the needs of an expanding and diversified user base. A first step toward growth is to cultivate new users. We present results from research that examines one approach to the challenge of attracting new users to a large-scale computing infrastructure. We describe gateway organizations and the important social and technical support they provide, which help potential users to conceptualize a use for the infrastructure and increase their willingness and ability to use it.

In many disciplines success depends onaccess to scarce resources, such as unique instruments. Researchon computer-supported cooperative work has contributed to the development of technologies, such as collaboratories, that broaden access to scarce scientific and engineering resources. While broader access is often applauded, little attention has been focused on the problem of equitable and efficient resource allocation in the face of increased demand created through collaboratory use. This paper, then, uses the framework of mechanism design to evaluate different resource allocation schemes (RAD, Vickery, and knapsack). Experimental results show that knapsack achieves a more equitable distribution of resources than RAD or Vickery, but that RAD and Vickery are both more efficient than knapsack. The findings highlight the need for systematic exploration of allocation mechanisms within collaboratories, where simple optimization (e.g., knapsack) is likely to produce a sub-optimal match of resources to needs. More generally, the findings illustrate the utility of experimental economic approaches in understanding issues that emerge in large-scale collaborations, such as entire scientific and engineering communities.

Abstract The Sakai Project ( http://www.sakaiproject.org ) is developing a collaborative environment that provides capabilities that span teaching and learning as well as e‐Research applications. By exploiting the significant requirements overlap in the collaboration space between these areas, the Sakai community can harness significant resources to develop an increasingly rich set of collaborative tools. While collaboration is a significant element of many e‐Research projects, there are many other important elements including portals, data repositories, compute resources, special software, data sources, desktop applications, and content management/e‐Publication. The successful e‐Research projects will find ways to harness all of these elements to advance their science in the most effective manner. It is critical to realize that there is not a single software product that can meet the requirements for such a rich e‐Research effort. Realizing that multiple elements must be integrated together for best effect leads us to focus on understanding the nature of integration and working together to improve the cross‐application integration. This leads us not to drive towards a single toolkit (such as Sakai or Globus), but instead to a meta‐toolkit containing well‐integrated applications. When considering a technology for use, perhaps the most important aspect of that technology is how well it integrates with other technologies. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper reports on the emergent use of lightweight text chat to provide important grounding and facilitation information in a large, distributed, ad-hoc group of researchers participating in a live experiment. The success of chat in this setting suggests a critical re-examination and extension of Clark and Brennan's work on grounding in communication. Specifically, it is argued that there are some settings characterized by reduced information and clarification needs, where the use of extremely lightweight tools (such as basic text chat) can be sufficient for achieving common ground - even when conversational participants are unknown to each other. Theoretical and design implications are then presented.

In this paper, we describe the evolution and impact of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) research through social network analysis of coauthorship data. A network of authors as nodes and shared papers as links is used to compare patterns of growth and collaboration in CSCW with other domains, such as high-energy physics and computer science. Further, the coauthorship network data are used to depict dynamic changes in the structure of CSCW collaborations over time. Examination of these changes shows high volatility in the composition of the CSCW research community over decade-long time spans. These data are augmented by a brief citation analysis of recent CSCW conferences. We discuss the implications of the CSCW findings in terms of the influence of CSCW research on the larger field of HCI research as well as the general utility of social network analysis for understanding patterns of collaboration.

We report on our experiences of introducing an instant messaging and group chat application into geographically distributed workgroups. We describe a number of issues we encountered, including privacy concerns, individual versus group training, and focusing on teams or individuals. The perception of the tool's utility was a complex issue, depending both on users' views of the importance of informal communication, and their perceptions of the nature of cross-site communication issues. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of critical mass, which is related to the features each user actually uses. More generally, we encountered a dilemma that imposes serious challenges for user-centered design of groupware systems

Global software development is rapidly becoming the norm for technology companies. Previous qualitative research suggests that multi-site development may increase the development cycle time. We use both survey data and data from the source code change management system to model the extent of delay in a multi-site software development organization, and explore several possible mechanisms for this delay. We also measure differences in same-site and cross-site communication patterns, and analyze the relationship of these variables to delay. Our results show that, compared to same-site work, cross-site work takes much longer and requires more people for work of equal size and complexity. We also report a strong relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy. We discuss the implications of our findings for collaboration technology for distributed software development.

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 comparable single-site work. We use both survey data and data from the change management system to measure the extent of delay in a multi-site software development organization. We also measure site interdependence, differences in same-site and cross-site communication patterns, and analyze the relationship of these variables to delay. Our results show a significant relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy. This result is particularly troubling in light of the finding that workers generally believed they were as helpful to their remote colleagues as to their local colleagues. We discuss implications of our findings for collaboration technology for distributed organizations.

Article Free Access Share on Tutorials (summary) Authors: Tom Finholt University of Michigan University of MichiganView Profile , Mark S. Ackerman University of California, Irvine, University of California, Irvine,View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 427–431https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289522Published:01 November 1998Publication History 0citation512DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads512Last 12 Months8Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Goals and objectives: Evaluating CSCW systems is much more difficult than evaluating single-user systems because of the additional group and organizational factors. Behavioral evaluation consists of having people use CSCW technologies under appropriate conditions and gathering either qualitiative or quantitative information about their behavior.