Enhancing Groupware

with multimedia

Acknowledgements to Euan Wilson (Staffordshire University)

Why?

• Co-operative working involves a number of people working together to achieve a common goal

• The distribution of organisations often requires that personnel are forced to work with colleagues who are situated remotely

“Home working”

• Email, document exchanger etc. have assisted but there is still a failure to provide the level of user interaction that is required for co-operative working

Computer Support for Co-operative Working (CSCW)

• Term coined by Grief and Cashman [1984]

• exact meaning of term is open to debate but most authors agree– work is a co-operative activity, generally

involving groups of people interacting to achieve common goals

– the designers of supporting computer systems must address this co-operative nature of work

Role of Multimedia in Asynchronous Co-operation

• Often referred to as message systems

• build and send messages

• widely accepted and used

• many systems provide textual

• some allow the user to embed / attach other types of media (sound, video etc.)

Synchronous Co-operation

• Requires – the present of co-operating users– a shared information space / resources

• Provides– multiple users with synchronous

access to the same data– speeds up processes which require the

involvement of remote users

Synchronous Co-operation

– Joint access to information reduces many of the overheads of travel and pre-arranged visits

– periods of interaction between remote users become more frequent and shorter in duration (reflecting more an inter-building style of communication)

Synchronous Groupware

• Goal of achieving a shared digital workspace

• 4 classes– Desktop conference systems– Shared screens / windows– electronic meeting / decision rooms– media spaces include audio / visual

Desktop conferencing systems

– workstation based applications for collaborative work at a number of desktops

• outlining, writing, sketching, drawing, building spreadsheets etc.

– originally intended to augment face-to-face interactions

– later expanded to support distance conferencing

– [Engelbart 1994]

– Basic concept that all users saw the same things on their screen (a shared view) and

– each could take turns interacting with the system

• Xerox PARC– collaborative brainstorming, argument

development, free style sketching– small groups of two to six individuals

System Infrastructure for Desktop Conferencing

• Two general approaches to building groupware– Collaboration transparency

• a single user application wrapped by system software to make it usable by a group

– Collaboration aware• an application that is modified or re-

written

Issues with Groupware over a network

• Greenberg & Marwood 1994 outlined– distributed processing

– replicated information consistency

– creating and maintaining real-time consistent views of a shared digital workspace

– synchronisation issues

– concurrency control

Approaches

• A single-user application deployed to multiple workstations which accepts inputs from all (requires a screen sharing system)

• or

• A windowing sharing system which enables the user to have a private workspace and to be able to share work when it suits the individual user

• Or– replicated verses centralised

architecture

Issues - Shared view systems

• Both Screen and Windows sharing systems leverage existing software into groupware

• therefore off-the-shelf software can be utilised, which has a major benefit in terms of cost, training, deployment etc.

But … two serious limitations

– shared software is collaborative transparent the systems offer limited group capabilities

• this forces the group to work around the system I.e. only one member may be able to work at one time

– technical limitations of the software• issues arise due to the infrastructure of

both the underlying operating systems and technical design of the software

Therefore

• Most systems are developed with the technical issues rather than what the users require.

• This results in performance issues and usability problems

Resulted in

• Research – moving away from operating system issues to

support groupware to– design and construction of environments,

toolkits and languages for building groupware» [GroupKit, Greenberg and Roseman 1994]» [Rendezvous, Patterson 1993]

– requirements for systems to facilitate customisation and application evolutions

» [Dourish 1995]

Electronic Meeting Rooms

• Original pioneers where not in Computing or Commercial R&D but in management and business schools

• requirement to produce GDSS

• seen as primary product of “management”

GDSS

• Tools to support– idea generation– idea organisation– prioritising– voting (normally anonymous)

Issues concerning the design of GDSS

• Architectural and ergonomic – Aspects of room, placement of people,

method of user participation

• can effect– effectiveness and usability of the system

• other issues– interior design, colours, shape of table,

position of workstations with respect to table

Idea Organisation

• Tedious task of idea organisation has been attached by using semantic analysis programs to make a first pass at clustering ideas

• although imperfect it has been found that people enjoy this stage more when the software has made a first pass

» [Nunamaker and Briggs 1994]

Media Spaces

• Is a computer-controlled teleconferencing system in which audio and video communication and shared digital workspaces are used to overcome the barriers of physical separation

Media Spaces support

• Interpersonal space as well as a shared task space

» [Buxton 1992]

• They not only support an application in use but give its users an awareness of who is around and how they can be reached

» [Cockburn and Greenberg 1993]

Research has shown that video

• Can reduce physical barriers (through transmission over a network)

• and temporal barriers (through recording and playback)

Xerox Parc

• Mid 80’s

• Linked two labs by a 56 Kps lease line

• Audio and video link with a central feature of a video window

• allowed both labs to function and feel like one group and to convey a sense of presence

• Certain verbal and non verbal cues where not transmitted as well as they would have been in a face-to-face situation.

• Resulted in the need to alter social protocols, supplement face-to-face meetings for video, and to be sensitive to issues of privacy

Deployment & Use of Groupware

• Grudin (1988)– Most groupware requires that all

group members that use the application, but not everyone benefits

– Intuition is a less reliable guide in developing and selecting groupware that single-user applications

– Evaluating groupware is more difficult than single-user applications

Additional challenges

– The need to reach a critical mass– difficulty of supporting existing social

conventions– high degree of exception handling and

improvisation that characterise group activity

– designing features that are unobtrusive yet accessible

– developers must carefully meet the challenge of adoption of the system