Where the rubber meets the road

Special Issue : Position Papers from the CSCW '94 W orkshop s Author Contac t Christine A . Halverson, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA . 92093-0515 ; tel : 619-534-4348 ; email : halverso@cogsci . ucsd .edu . Other workshop participant s Kovalainen Mikko University of Jyvaeskylae Information Technology Research Institute Jyvaeskylae Finland ; email : kovalainen@cs .jyu .fi Auramaeki Esa University of Jyvaeskylae Departmen t of Computer Science and Information Systems Jyvaeskyla e Finland ; fax : 358-41-603611 tel . 358-41-603027 ; email : esa@jytko .jyu .f i Carla Simone Computer Science Department Universit y of Milane Italy ; email : simone@hermes .mc .dsi .unimi .i t Contact individually for copies of position papers . Rodney Fuller Department of Psychology Claremon t Graduate School Claremont, CA 91711 USA ; email : fullerr@c • s .edu Workshop : Where the rubber meets the road : human interaction issues in technology sup ported environment s Workshop organizers : KC Burgess Yakemovic (kcby@netcom .com), Group Performance Systems ; Michael Harris , AT&T Global Information Solutions ; Rebecca Stephens, Georgia State University ; Welyne Thomas, SS T Consulting Group . Impressions from a Worksho p KC Burgess Yakemovic On 22 October 1994, as a part of the CSCW 94 conference , we held a workshop with the title Where the Rubber Meet s the Road : human interaction issues in technology supported environments . The call for participation described the work shop theme and goals as follows : Several years ago there were few commercially availabl e tools specifically meant to support people working togethe r in group settings . Today there are many, with more becoming available almost daily . However, both developers an d users of this technology have pointed to "the people problem" as a significant barrier to achieving the potential effec tiveness and efficiency improvements . Teamwork may be a goal of the purchasers of group support solutions, but i t seems that the behavior of people sometimes gets in th e way of performance . There are at least two major sour ce s of human interaction problems : pre-existing conditions tha t the technology reveals, and problems created by the technol ogy . This workshop will explore the human issues surrounding the use of technology to support groups and teams . The goals will be to : identify the "people problems" experienced i n the use of group support technolog y categorize, and if reasonable prioritize, thes e problem s identify possible solutions or research action s provide a forum for interaction between design ers (researchers) and users of CSCW technol og y The twenty workshop participants represented a wide variet y of expertise and experience . Some came from academi c backgrounds, others industrial . Some were designers and de velopers, others were users . Some worked with commercia l products, others worked with research prototypes . We structured the workshop to facilitate discussion . There were five short presentations each followed by a discussion period . After the discussion, we did some brain storming to develop a list of human interaction issues . Finally we loosely categorized the issues and ranked them fo r importance . It is impossible to summarize a day of widely rangin g discussion in a few paragraphs . Therefore, the rest of this article touches on a few of the items I personally found interesting . The most important discovery for me was finding tha t the term human interaction no longer implicitly refers people interacting with other people! It seems that to be clea r we must now specify human-human interaction— to avoi d confusion with human-technology interaction . For someon e who believes that machines should serve people, this was a rude awakening ! Another interesting finding was the diverse list of item s that the participants considered under the heading human in teraction issues . We came up with 42 items ; here are a fe w to give you a flavor for the rang e • Lack of shared meaning for the term interpersona l Flexibility of system vs . motivation of th e use r • Power • Worldview (system versus user ) • Individual differences • Ease of Us e ~ Cultural difference s ~ Listenin g Effects of distributed relationship s Autonomy and contro l Personal style (preferences ) SIGOIS Bulletin, December 1994/Vol . 15, No . 2 11 Special Issue : Position Papers from the CSCW '94 W orkshop s • Lack of good models (in facilitation, group dynamics ) • Conflict avoidanc e • Reward s • Fixation on consensu s When we prioritized the issues, there were two that rated al most half of the votes ; trust and [different] viewpoints . The issue of trust, and particularly trust in a technology sup ported environment -- where the participants in a group ma y never meet face to face -- is no doubt a problem that require s research . The viewpoints problem is also difficult ; how d o we deal with interactions where everyone thinks they understand what the other meant . . . but they really do not, becaus e they have interpreted the others message from a differen t context . I believe that the workshop satisfied the goals of bein g a forum for elucidating the issues, and for establishing connections between various communities . It was especiall y gratifying to see groups of participants in animated discussion during conference breaks . Finally, I want to thank m y co-organizers, Michael Harris (AT&T Human Interfac e Technology Center) and Rebecca Stephens (Georgia State University), as well as Mark Meyer (AT&T Busines s Communication Systems) for their help in making thi s workshop happen . If the topic of human-human interaction issues interest s you, please consider joining the mailing list cscw-humanissues-l . We formed this list to initiate the workshop discussion, and to allow the discussion to be continued after th e workshop with an expanded group . To subscribe, send a n email message to listserv@netcom .com with the body of the message containing the text : SUBSCRIBE cscw-human-issues- 1 You will receive additional information about the list in response to your message . If you would like more information regarding the workshop discussion, or the mailing list, please contact m e Workshop Contact KC Burgess Yakemovic, Group Performance Systems , Inc ., 4776 Village North Court, Atlanta GA 30338 USA ; tel : 404-395-0282 ; fax : 404-395-0282 ; email : kcby@netcom .com . Workshop : The cobbler's children : How can and should we use CSCW tools in our own work ? Workshop organizers : Robert Halperin (rrhalp@mit .edu), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ; and Kevi n Crowston . University of Michiga n Telia Interest in CSCW Tool s and Activities/Experience s Lennart Isaksso n Telia Corporation, Swede n Telia is working with packaging of telecommuter teleco m services and CSCW functionality for different business & work areas . This is done in order to make it easier for th e companies to begin telecommuting . In this work, we are cooperating with vendors of CSCW software, communication HW/SW etc . A first package has been developed an d more packages are planned later this year . We are offerin g packages of different ambition levels to suit different customers needs & economy . The CSCW vendors and Telia ar e individually & together marketing the whole packages . Telia is experimenting with different CSCW applications in order to get experience on how new telecommunication services should be specified in order to best support th e CSCW applications . For example, Telia are running a gigabit MAN (Metropolitan Network) in Stockholm together with Ericsson (Telecommunications vendor) and SIC S (Swedish Institute of Computer Science) . On this testbed , we are evaluating CSCW functionality as desk top videoconference, shared applications etc . One bottleneck that has been experienced is that todays computers can't manage the avail able communication speed . The relatively poor quality o f desk-top videoconference (low number of frames/second) depends on the low performance of the working stations ability to manage high data volumes . We have also activities 12 SIGOIS Bulletin, December 1994/Vol . 15, No . 2 going on in the area to run CSCW applications on the Internet . Telia is a large coorporation itself, and are experimenting with CSCW applications in order to increase the productivity of our own work . We are therefore running several trials using CSCW functionality inside an office and in distributed office environments . Telia is also engaged in a new research center in Lulee , which is a joint venture between the University of Lulee , the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Telia and som e other industries . The goal is to develop better CSCW an d tele/data-communication technology in order to make distributed work more efficient. One of the companies in the Telia company group i s Promotor . They are working as system integrators helpin g Swedish companies to become more efficient by use of IT . One part is to help them develop workable CSCW solution s based on existing components . The interest in the CSCW conference is mainly to ge t an updated view of the CSCW status in the research community and to get an updated view of what functionalit y works well already in existing products . A very important aspect is psyco-social factors and ho w they affect the design and utilization of CSCW functionality . In my view, there are several nice CSCW features avail able in some systems today, but I believe we have som e work to do in order to integrate them in such a way that the y will be enough flexible & easy to use . It is also necessary t o secure that they will give the requested support to our an d other companies business processes . If the tool functionality