Computer Supported Co-operative work

(CSCW)

Craig Cockburn

Is it a fact ... that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851).

This paper discusses the topic of Computer Supported Co-operative Work, a term first used in 1984 by Paul Cashman and Irene Greif.

The E-mail and FTP addresses quoted in this paper are unfortunately liable to change.

Introduction

Scientific American[1] defines CSCW as:

"Technology which allows people in remote places to interact with each other

and with the same documents and files through voice, data and video links"

The motivation for studying this subject came from using global networks and experiencing CSCW on a daily basis for the last six years and seeing the way in which it can improve people's lives, both for work and recreational purposes. The author hopes to set up an access point to the Internet which will allow many others to join this dynamic network culture.

The ease with which many minds can work together to share a common purpose provides many exciting possibilities. It is hoped that this paper will help the reader to become enthusiastic and informed about CSCW and its possibilities for the future.

Current research

Historical overview

Although videoconferencing has been around for 30 years, and much work on graphical CSCW was done as long ago as 1968[2], the most widely used CSCW techniques have been until recently, text based asynchronous systems such as E-mail.

The growth of E-Mail began with the launch of the ARPANET in 1969 as an experiment by the US government in packet switching networks. The ARPANET eventually became the network we know today as The Internet. Whilst access to The Internet today is easy and can cost nothing to subscribe to[3], early access was highly restricted and limited to the military, defence contractors and universities doing defence research[4]. As recently as 1981 there were only 213 machines on the Internet. Today, a conservative estimate puts the number at 1.5 million machines connecting over 10 million people on six continents. CompuServe alone has over 1.3 million subscribers (Computing 12-Aug-93 P20-21).

Another early development was VideoTeX (VTX). This is a forms based read-only interface intended for displaying mostly static information to many people, like Teletext. Only system managers can update the information on VTX. VTX today has developed into a hypertext like menu system with keywords, search facilities and an X-based GUI.

Usenet news started in 1979[5], and as of August 93 there are approximately 2.6 million[6] people reading news and at least 5,800 newsgroups. The primary difference between E-Mail and news is that with E-Mail, the sender controls the distribution. With news however, the doesn't know who is reading the messages and recipients control which groups to read.

Following on from E-mail and news (both asynchronous groupware systems), came UNIX Talk (a simpler version of Internet Relay Chat) and VAX Phone, both synchronous systems which users to communicate in real time like using a telephone. The user's screen is divided into sections, with one section as their own and one section for each person they are talking to. UNIX talk is capable of working across the Internet from one organisation to another, whereas VAX phone can only be used by two users on the same DECnet network. Talk and Phone have lead onto other similar systems such as The York Conferencer system (see Alan Dix et al, Human Computer Interaction, Prentice Hall, Fig 14.2, Page 490). Chapters 13 and 14 of this book provide useful reading on groupware and CSCW.

Present Situation

Dix (p425) follows the standard taxonomy in CSCW and breaks down CSCW by two dimensions, namely Time (synchronous and asynchronous) and place (co-located and remote). I feel however that this classifying by place puts too much emphasis on hardware dependencies arising from geographic location. It is usually the case for software to lag behind advances in hardware and this will become particularly obvious in the next few decades in networking. With Gigabit per second communications now being planned and 200 MIPS processors now readily available for PCs, the limiting issues for CSCW aren't going to be where people are located, but will be determined mainly by software functionality, desktop hardware and social issues, rather than network hardware. However, here are a few CSCW examples classified according to the conventional time/space model.

Synchronous, co-located: Shared work surfaces

Synchronous, remote: Video conferencing

Asynchronous, co-located: Active badges

Asynchronous, remote: E-Mail and electronic conferences

Trends and social impact

Early systems were software oriented and asynchronous due to the limits imposed by network bandwidths. However, network speeds are now increasing towards the Gigabit per second envisaged by Senator Al Gore in his High Performance Computing Act (December 1991)[7], and the limiting factor is becoming the hardware available on the desktop or in the meeting room rather than the network in between. Another trend has been for CSCW to expand from just a computer perspective with difficult to use tools intended for hackers, e.g. UNIX Mail, to more people-oriented forms of communication. These new forms are suitable for assisting people who might not normally be computer users to hold interactive group meetings. An example of this is the £16 million ISDN network (RURTEL) run by Highlands and Islands Enterprise which allows the exchange of business information for crofters, fishermen, tourist information offices etc.

Today, we are seeing a rapid growth in the use of networks and applications to support CSCW and considerable development of the early applications such as E-mail. As a result of these developments, there are also tremendous social changes which arise now that people in remote locations can communicate with people as easily as those in cities, and people move out of the office and start to work more off-site and in their own homes. Although Teleworking (working at a distance) is big enough to be considered a separate subject, CSCW and teleworking are closely related as CSCW technologies (i.e. E-mail and Notes) have helped many teleworkers. The growth of teleworking is also a major reason for interest in CSCW. The following statistics show that there are great market opportunities for CSCW in this field.

1. In 1989 it was estimated that 26 million Americans work from home (Psychology Today, November 1989). This figure is about 10% of the US population.

2. The number of people working from home is growing at about 10% a year (PC Week: 23-April-1990). However, this number is limited by management's acceptance of teleworking and would be higher if Management was more "sold" on teleworking.

3. In 1990, 38% of American households had a Personal Computer.

In France, over 18% of households are connected to the public information system Minitel.

4. The Henley Centre for Forecasting predicts there will be 2.5 million UK based

Teleworkers by 1995. The British lead the world in the field of telecommuting

(Francis Kinsman "The Telecommuters").

23% of all British employees are interested in telecommuting.

5. The market for Groupware is planned to grow from $1.86 billion today to $5.73 billion in 1998 (Computing: 12-August-1993)

For more information on teleworking, contact The National Association of Teleworkers,

The Island House, Midsomer Norton, Bath, Avon, BA3 2HL.

Tel: 0761- 413869.

E-mail 100063.462@compuserve.com. This organisation was launched on 10-Sep-92.

Key individuals and research teams

Research in CSCW is taking place at Xerox's research lab in Palo Alto (PARC) as well as their EuroPARC in Cambridge. Many employees at these locations have video cameras attached to their terminals for video communication. Research at the PARCs has focused on multi-media communication environments, the social structure of work and design, social control and negotiation of tasks, and designing interfaces which adapt to the changing aspects of a group and the group's behaviour[8]. One of the Xerox projects is MOO, an object-oriented, text-based, multiple-user, multi-tasking, interactive virtual reality.

The last year has also seen the launch of "Personal Communicators". These are portable pocket sized machines, usually with fax, E-mail, diaries and handwriting recognition. This is a highly competitive field and products have come from General Magic (E-mail @genmagic.com) and Apple has launched the Newton. There are also similar products from EO Inc. and Amstrad. These machines help people to keep in close contact with their work and colleagues. Perhaps such machines could also be fitted with Active Badge technology so that they could be tracked down easily if mislaid or stolen.

Intel too has recognised the value of CSCW and is now devoting 20% of its R&D budget of $1Bn on full motion video technology. Intel's forthcoming product Indeo V3.0 will be able to do "full-screen full-motion playback" on 486/66 and Pentium PC's.

Silicon Graphics Inc. recently launched a multimedia machine, Indy, which Silicon Graphics claim is "the first desktop computing appliance designed expressly for video and graphics production". Indy has hi-fi sound and the capability to perform 3-D graphics, real-time desktop video conferencing and video mail (Computer Weekly 12-Aug-93, P16-17).

Venturing from the desktop based office worker to the hi-tech worker on the road, we find the amazing solar powered "hi-tech nomad" Steven Roberts (wordy@edu.ucsd). Steven worked via computer from a bicycle converted into an office. The bicycle (worth $1.2 million) is solar powered, has a fax machine, a modem, satellite communications, a cellular phone and his helmet has a "heads-up" display. Steven maintains his contacts through E-mail on the Internet and by usenet news. His current project is to transfer this technology to boats and have electronic nomads sailing around the world in "Microships".

Nathaniel S. Borenstein (nsb@bellcore.com) is one of the main contacts for the development of new mail standards. He wrote RFC 1341 (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)[9], and has published papers on multi-media electronic mail, mail as a tool for co-operative work, and secure active messaging.

The University of Calgary's CSCW and groupware laboratory has built GroupKit, a groupware toolkit for developing real-time conferencing applications. GroupKit takes account of technical issues associated with groupware, i.e. synchronisation, communication, concurrency and registration as well as human centred requirements such as support for gesturing, graphical annotation, floor control policies, registration methods (who is allowed to join the meeting), support for latecomers and spontaneous conferences.

Issues

Software Oriented Technologies

Rapid growth in CSCW has caused many problems, with the main one being sheer volume and a real danger of "information burnout". The growing numbers of people and applications connected to The Internet are causing Internet traffic to grow at approximately 10% a month (Source: Vice President Al Gore, August 1992). The Information Lens (T.W. Malone et al. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 5(2), 115-131 1987) is one of the better known tools to manage this quantity. Given that usenet news alone carries 27,000+ messages and over 61Mb of information per day6, the task of filtering information is clearly both essential and difficult. Some techniques for filtering information involve attaching keywords to messages so that they can be found quickly. Applications have been written to process, forward and delete messages automatically, and some mail systems allow mail messages to have various priorities.

An example of automated mail processing is the LISTSERV software which allows a group of people interested in a common subject to easily exchange information between each other, with the LISTSERV controlling access, managing membership lists, administering common files and distributing messages. LISTSERV lists exist for a variety of topics, one such topic being the GAELIC-L list for discussion in the three Gaelics. This list has over 450 members and gives them an opportunity to learn and use languages which they would otherwise not have access to because of their location. There are many similar projects for distance learning using CSCW. However, as with many mail based systems, this list has only used text based mail. This has started to change, and the author recently sent the first voice encoded message to one of the other GAELIC-L owners. This will eventually allow Gaelic voice samples and speech can be readily available to all the subscribers. LISTSERV is an example of a system that uses commands embedded in mail messages to perform certain tasks. These mail servers are a common theme and can be seen recurring both in FTPmail which the author used to fetch files for this paper, and as the application field in the proposed standard RFC 1341.

E-Mail styles and problems

A drawback of E-mail is that it lacks the facial expressions and voice intonations that form such an important part of communication. This has resulted in "smiley faces" to convey intonation, of which a selection include:

:-) witty comment ;-) winking :^) cheeky :-D tongue sticking out etc.

Also as a result of the lack of body language and voice intonation in E-mail, it is often easy to misinterpret what people say (particularly because much E-mail is written in a hurry). People can often get upset when reading mail messages and this can result in "flame wars".

Shorthand English is used far more when writing messages on the network than in normal communication. Some frequently seen abbreviations are FYI (For Your Information), BTW (By the way) and IMHO (In My Humble Opinion). Communication is also usually extremely informal on networks, with people hardly ever using surnames, titles, or normal letter writing forms such as "Dear" or "Yours sincerely". Books about the Internet also follow this highly informal and chatty style.

Multimedia mail

Although ISO8859-1 characters (e.g. á, ß, ñ, ç) still aren't supported by the Internet, a fact which frustrates every non-English speaker, some local mail systems have progressed significantly and allow documents to be exchanged and viewed which contain graphics and various fonts (e.g. DECwindows Mail). The receiving mail application automatically detects mail messages of this kind and uses the correct method for displaying them.

Electronic mail has developed from a simple mechanism which allows users to send text based documents, to systems today which allow sound to be embedded in messages. The NeXT mailer system being probably the easiest of these to use. However, full multimedia mail systems are now emerging using the recently proposed Multimedia standard for E-mail9. This standard provides a much needed common platform for compatible multimedia mail systems and the public domain MetaMail[10] is an early implementation of the new standard.

Current E-mail technology and network bandwidth are being pushed to their limits with the launch earlier this year of Internet Talk Radio (E-mail: info@radio.com). This is a professionally produced digitally encoded "radio" programme for technical issues concerning about the Internet. The programmes include interviews, conference reports and discussions. The programmes are professionally recorded, mixed with music and voice-overs and available by anonymous FTP from several sites. A half-hour programme takes up about 15 Megabytes. The sound format is freely convertible via public domain software (e.g. sox) and is compatible with many popular hardware architectures. The aim of Internet Talk Radio is to act like a noticeboard and to keep the network community informed of new developments in an entertaining and lively way. This is a big change from the VTX noticeboard mentioned earlier.

With E-mail, there seems to be a merging of technologies taking place. Many of the functions of electronic mail are now similar to that of a database, allowing a mixture of different items to be stored, manipulated, transmitted and searched through. Compare the emerging Video Mail technology with BT's Video Phone launched in 1992 and Voice Mail technology and it becomes apparent that communications technologies are converging. This merging of technology is also evident with Computer Integrated Telephony (CIT) which allows access to a telephone through a computer interface.

CSCW reaches into many fields and multi-media is now capable of operating over great distances. The X based program xmosaic is an interface to the World Wide Web (WWW) started at CERN. Xmosaic allows a hypertext document to have links to files on machines across the world. This technology is very exciting and is based on the idea that setting up a connection to other computers is becoming cheap. Imagine hundreds of people on many continents collaborating on a single document. This is what WWW is aiming for and it works today. As well as WWW, there are other similar information retrieval systems (WAIS and Gopher).

A number of products have been launched which significantly enhance the ideas present in usenet news. These products include Digital's VAX Notes, Rapport from Bell Labs, Forums on CompuServe, and finally Lotus Notes, which has over 400,000 users and is generally acknowledged as the best product in this field. These applications have a tremendous impact on Corporate Culture and business practices. In Digital, VAX Notes has become the prime means of finding out information about what's happening in the company, and a Senior Vice President of Lotus says that "Lotus is run on Notes", only 2½ years after its introduction (Source: The Impact of Lotus Notes on Organisational Productivity Lotus Corporation, November 1992).

Shared Applications

Many existing applications are now being converted for CSCW. These include shared mice, shared windowing systems (Shared X developed by HP), shared editors, co-authoring systems, shared diaries (i.e. Digital's ALL-IN-1 product). These issues are described in more detail in Dix and a framework for support of these issues is described in A high-level and flexible framework for Implementing Multiuser User Interfaces (ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol. 10, No. 4, October 1992, Pages 345-380).

Hardware Oriented Technologies

The introduction of videoconferencing allowed fully fledged meetings to be held over great distance with people seeing their counterparts in the meeting even though they may be on the other side of the world. A comparison of Video mediated communication against face to face communication was performed by the University of London in July 1992[11] and examines human factors for Videoconferencing failing to gain widespread acceptance, despite the technology being available for nearly 30 years.

It is a problem that most current Operating Systems do not provide much support for group working, this is an issue which needs to be resolved in the future as it is becoming evident that such support is required, particularly if standards are to gain widespread use.

Groupware to the home

Cable technology is now becoming readily available and has recently become available in Edinburgh from United Artists. Cable not only allows a TV to communicate bidirectionally, but Ethernet can also be run over cable TV networks (ETV). ETV was piloted in 1990 at 10Mbps (Mega bits per second) and predictions were that speeds today would be about 50Mbps, about 1,000 times the speed of any modem. United Artists is expanding into this area have invested £70 million and laid 1,000 miles of cable supporting such technologies. BT is moving into high speed pan-European networks (Computing, 13-Aug-93) and this will also have an impact on data communications. ISDN is available to many cities today and this can offer 64Kbps, a great improvement on the 2.4Kbps modems only a few years ago. ISDN is to be succeeded by Broadband ISDN (BISDN), and the Asynchronous Transfer Mode offered by BISDN is expected to be supported by most telecommunication companies. It is predicted that by 2005 there will be BISDN Fibre Optic links to many homes and these lines will be running at 622Mbps. Putting this in perspective, it's significantly faster than the internal bus on today's custom built high power graphics workstations. Even faster BISDN speeds (2.4 Giga bps) are currently being studied. It is expected that 50% of homes will be served by fibre optic lines by the year 2010, at which time computers are expected to operate at 4,000 MIPS. Looking even further ahead, Digital's 200Mhz Alpha chip is designed to scale up to 200Ghz by the year 2017. Such powerful technology provides many opportunities for synchronous groupware to the workplace, whether it is in the home or in a traditional office.

High speed communications do much to provide the virtually instantaneous response which is so essential in many groupware systems such as videoconferencing. Even a small delay can prove very distracting as many people often notice when speaking on the phone via a satellite link. Another problem caused by network delays is that they also introduce complex locking problems, although much can be learnt from the field of distributed databases to solve these issues.

Social issues

The application of groupware and CSCW can raise many difficult social issues including:

1. How is a teleworker managed from a distance? How is their performance assessed? Physical isolation from work colleagues may result in people failing to develop interpersonal skills or may cause reduced company loyalty (Computer Weekly: 23-Sep-88). Low visibility in the office may also affect promotion prospects.

2. Some terminals are being fitted with video cameras. Is this an invasion of privacy? It is sometimes difficult to separate home life from work life when there's a terminal in your house, for example Sir John Harvey-Jones found that a terminal in the house was an invasion of his home privacy.

3. Easy access to other employees in the company, particularly through informal electronic channels, leads to a dramatic power shift. On the positive side, technical experts can be asked questions with ease and can be available to solve problems. Bugs can easily be tracked using Notes software and technical problems discussed. However, an important issue is how the company culture will be affected by people using electronic channels to bypass the traditional power hierarchies and possibly to air their grievances in "public".

Great claims have been made for CSCW, but in practice the change in productivity is often difficult to measure accurately. Some explanations of why CSCW often fails to meet expectations are given in J. Grundlin's Why CSCW applications fail (Proceedings of conference on CSCW pp85-93, ed. D. Tater, Portland Oregon, Sept. 1988, ACM Press)

However, there are many positive benefits to commend using groupware technology from the home. It is useful for the disabled and can give them much easier access to work (Infoworld 9-October-89 P48), it can result in increased productivity, it can result in cost savings for employers and as it is seen as a 'perk', it can be used to attract high quality staff. Not only are many employers supportive of teleworking, but also large amounts of public funding has come for teleworking such as the Highlands and Islands Enterprise network mentioned earlier, GreenNet (support@gn.apc.org) which is making the Internet more publically accessible, and the Aberystwyth TeleTowns project which I believe involves Prince Charles (contacts: Dave Price dap@aber.ac.uk and Brian Cooper brc@aber.ac.uk).

Further Information

This section covers other sources of information not specifically cited in the text.

ACM

ACM Special Interest Groups on Computer-Human interaction (SIGCHI), Office Information Systems (SIGOIS - Includes CSCW), Hypertext and Hypermedia (SIGLINK)

ACM publication Interactions. A magazine on applied HCI.

Communications of the ACM. Special issues on: Groupware (December 91), Multimedia (January 93), Graphical User Interfaces (April 93), Participatory Design (June 93).

British Computer Society

BCS HCI Special Interest Group.

Tel: 0793- 480269. address: BCS, PO Box 1454, Station Road, Swindon SN1 1TG

Usenet/Internet

Usenet newsgroups:

comp.groupware - General discussions on groupware and CSCW.

comp.infosystems.gopher - Information on Gopher, a client-server protocol for making a world wide information service, see also the file rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/gopher-faq

(available by anonymous FTP)

comp.mail.mime - Extensions to mail for video, audio, images etc.

comp.mail.multi-media - Multi-media and E-mail

news.future - Future developments in usenet news software

Internet

Internet Society (founded January 1992) E-mail: isoc@isoc.org.

An international, professional membership organisation to promote the Internet for research, communication and collaboration.

Due to the Internet being extremely powerful, but difficult to use, there are many books to guide people around its facilities. Probably the best one is "The Internet Passport", available from Computer Literacy Bookshops, E-mail: info@clbooks.com

CSCW Research

Human Computer Interaction Bibliography

A database of extended bibliographic information on HCI, accessible via E-mail. Send a blank E-mail to: hcibib@rumpus.colorado.edu for information on this extremely useful system.

The Concurrent Engineering Research Center, West Virginia University, P.O. Box 6506, 886 Chestnut Ridge Road, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA.

Contact: Mary Carriger (carriger@cerc.wvu.edu). This centre researches on sharing information, eliminating barriers due to distance, integrating tools and team co-ordination.

Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.

Two M.Sc. theses are of particular interest:

The Shared Desktop: Synchronous CSCW (Peter Cigéhn). October 92

Multi-media mail systems: Asynchronous CSCW. Magnus Hedberg. December 1992.

E-mail: magnus@lulea.trab.se Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.luth.se:/pub/misc/rs.

An extremely thorough review of mail technologies, both present and future.

Swedish Institute of Computer Science is researching into distributed multimedia and integrating CSCW tools with a 3D virtual environment. (INTERCHI '93 papers, ACM press). Contacts: {bjorn, cc, lef}@sics.se.