Understanding the role of documents in a hierarchical flow of work

Technology generation to dissemination: lessons learned from the tef improvement project

Indigenous crops also known as orphan crops are key contributors to food security, which is becoming increasingly vulnerable with the current trend of population growth and climate change. They have the major advantage that they fit well into the general socio-economic and ecological context of developing world agriculture. However, most indigenous crops did not benefit from the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased the yield of major crops such as wheat and rice. Here, we describe the Tef Improvement Project, which employs both conventional- and molecular-breeding techniques to improve tef—an orphan crop important to the food security in the Horn of Africa, a region of the world w…

Paperwork at 78kph

Identity in virtual communities

The usability of Collaborative Virtual Environments is a function of technical affordances with the implicit and explicit intentions of users. Intentions can be revealed by 'cyborg ethnography' -- a close examination of interactions and conversations conducted in CVE's. Three CVE's were examined ethnographically and it is found that social conventions develop around the theme of producing identity. However, there is doubt that such conventions constitute evidence of a 'virtual' social system.

The Studio: Reflections and Issues Arising

An advanced Telematic Studio was built at the University of Jyvaskyla to combine the latest technologies for local and distributed work and/or meetings. The objectives were to combine leading edge technologies with ethnographic design principles derived from CSCW and HCI to support a broad range of activities. We informed the design by studies of similar facilities on other sites. The Studio is popular, and it is easy to give glowing accounts of its use. Nevertheless, over three years a significant number of problems have arisen with both technologies and uses. Some of these are local. Others may be generalisable to any ‘cooperative building’. For example: problems with videoconferencing; i…

Diary as dialogue in papermill process control

CSCW '98 workshop program

This workshop will discuss different approaches used to evaluate CSCW systems. Our goal is to produce a taxonomy of evaluation methodologies for CSCW systems, idenillYing the type of systems for \\hich a technique is most useful, the stage of development in \\bich a methodology is appropriate, the resources needed to conduct an evaluation, and the appropriate measures for the various techniques. We plan to discuss various methods of data collection for collaborative work and identi1)' the evaluation methodologies for \\hich various types of data collection are most appropriate. Other issues we hope to discuss during the workshop include sharing and comparing collected data, the usefulness o…

Diaries at work

Collaborative virtual environments in the year of the dragon

Three suggestions are made for extensions from and to CVE's: awareness of others, multiple media, and scalability. Awareness of others and their activities is strongly desirable in all media and applications, not just in CVE's. Multiple media are not seriously catered for in existing CVE's, and a suitable architecture will precede popular applications. CVE's need to be scalable to greater numbers of people, and achieving this also has implications for greater flexibility and reconfigurability. With respect to awareness of others, we argue that the Web and most document handling applications are unaware of others in the workgroup or community, and this limits the ability to support real work…

Multimedia application to support distance learning and other social interactions in real-time

Supporting social interactions, in distance learning situations for example, with modern technology is very difficult. Generally Internet, networked PC, document handling and communication services and applications are not designed from a multiple user perspective but to support a one-person-one-device (or tool) interaction. This approach creates problems for supporting awareness of, and communication with other people while simultaneously working on documents. Such simultaneous activities have been identified as essential by CSCW and CHI studies, where users are reported to move promiscuously between media and devices, and combine applications and media intuitively, while maintaining aware…

From information to conversation

We support the calls from many commentators to include human interaction in the web, rather than as an extra outside the web. We suggest a generic model of awareness, and some specific interpretations: action-event couplings to call a receiver; general awareness of known others; and local awareness of all others. We then consider extensions to the web into mobile and domestic appliances, and suggest that an underlying awareness service will be needed there as much, or more than in classic desktop web access.