Dept. of Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine
Social Activity in CSCW Systems
January 19, 1996
If Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) systems are
to be successful, it will be necessary to promote ongoing, continuing
activity. Even once a CSCW system gets past the critical mass
problem, users must continue to find it useful and usable. Only
some CSCW systems will provide the social and technical affordances
necessary to promote the social maintenance required for continued
use.
In this talk, I will present two inter-related streams of
research. The first is social, examining an existing CSCW system
(the MIT Zephyr help instance) for its social and technical mechanisms
that facilitate continuing use over time. The second is technical,
considering how to provide interface mechanisms for indicating
social activity. I will also provide an overview of how this
research fits into the design of a collaborative help and organizational
memory system, Answer Garden 2.
Mark S. Ackerman
is an Assistant Professor in the Computing, Organizations, Policy
and Society (CORPS) group within Information
and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine
. He received his Ph.D. in Information Technology from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 1993, working with Tom Malone. Prior
to attending MIT, he was an R&D software engineer and manager,
working on projects as diverse as the X Window System Toolkit
(Xt) and the Atari Ms. Pac-Man game.