Groupware. Then, CMC (with ontology). Then, CSCW

First a recap. In a previous post, I mention that the Internet is the ultimate CSCW artifact. I did that complying with what CSCW tackles as a discipline, succinctly exposed in Bannon & Schmidt’s paper. In their paper, Turoff et al. conclusively argue that the “web should be viewed as a massive group communication system” for Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) products to succeed in the sense of the principles they discuss in the chapter. In a strict scientific sense, CMC may be viewed as subsumed by CSCW. In another post, I argue that groupware is a subset, rather than a fork, of CSCW. In fact, if we view groupware as the set of artifacts (interfaces) that aid group communication, we may as well argue that groupware is a subtype of CMC. Hence, we’re still eddying within the realm of CSCW — nobody in the readings explicitly mentions it, however.

Yet, let it be. The pulp of CMC is its use of ontologies, even though this word (to my surprise) does not appear more than once in Turoff et al. The authors are dancing the ontological waltz by using synecdoches of the type: “problem-dependent discourse structure” to refer to “ad-hoc ontology” in their sense. But once again it proves the point that ontologies are vital to knowledge engineering and domain reasoning despite external skepticism. This writing thus rejects some of Shirky’s criticisms of, say, semantic hypertext over the web, which according to Shirky do not create knowledge, but confusion. (Apologies to Shirky if I sometimes unintentionally commit myself to straw-man conclusions…) Moreover, the criticism of subjective categorization in Sorting things out when it comes to social issues may very well be mitigated, at least in principle, through voting, as Turoff et al. argue.

Another important implication of CMC-related research is the base-rate question previously asked and subsequently answered. The question related to how often does face-to-face group collaboration yield collective intelligence versus collaboration between globally-distributed teams. Well, research shows that the latter brings about collective intelligence more often. Read, for instance, Bordia’s findings on the matter on top of what Turoff et al. have reported. I wonder whether collective intelligence shall now be excluded from the list of topical concerns discussed in Distance Matters: If what we really care about is collective intelligence to solve tough or rough problems, then how much would distance matter?

If ontologies help organize shared conceptualizations so that individuals/teams distributed globally can reason from them, then CSCW should get the most out of it. The overall point of this blogpost is to reiterate the fact that CSCW is nurtured by various disciplines (social, exact, natural) to nurture in return, as if reciprocating dal vivo, those disciplines.

It’s all about the framework

It’s probably not about the groupware itself. It’s not about what groupware should be able to accomplish in order to raise workspace awareness. It’s most certainly about the theoretical and methodological framework that churns out the awareness architecture from which instances of effectual groupware are yielded. Gutwin and Greenberg’s descriptive framework of workspace awareness provides a succinct working definition of awareness in collaborative environments. While most detailed depiction may appeal to us as redundant because of common sense, it is important to note that the fine skin of details provides for better insight into efficient interfaces. For instance, the HCI components discussed in the second part of the paper, in which the authors attempt to adapt their framework to distributed teams, may sound to us quite redundant in terms of factual representation, but at their time these components were viewed as essential and radical. It reminds me of Fitts’ Law, thanks to which we have sufficient insight to build better, say, menus.

With respect to the empirical results, I should want to assume a relatively skeptical position. First, it would have been more prudent on the authors’ side to reveal the number of users involved in the experiments as well as the geographical area they belonged to or the cultural-cognitive processes they adhered to, in the sense of Hutchins’ distributed cognition approach and in the sense of ethnographic analyses. It would be interesting to read whether awareness results would change from one organizational culture to another (e.g. North American vs. Russian). Moreover, research shows that when analyzing work settings, it is crucial to familiarize oneself with the work practices involved in such settings, which wasn’t the case with the authors in their experimental design, or that’s what the reader is left to conclude.

It is, however, important to note that workspace awareness in Gutwin and Greenberg’s sense seems to provide certain benefits in dynamical environments (systems). One would be team proactivity, wherein individuals are able to cope with unintended issues for the overall benefit. Another would be resilience of the dynamical environment (distributed team) itself. These two properties, however, are not bounded by groupware per se, but are properties that may very well be studied by humanizing the CSCW methodologies. In light of that, it would also be interesting to study how such frameworks would apply to geographically distributed teams as well — this would be more realistic in today’s working environments.

I should want to press on one final point, which seems to be capriciously particular of me. This entire idea of workspace awareness framework seems to me to be based on the more generic idea of distributed multi-agent systems (cf. p. 5, Neisser’s model). Here, the environment is considered “alive” and dissipates information, whereas the agents are supposed to be proactive and resilient while digesting such information. I argue that CSCW research needs to go after such guidelines while avoiding focus on narrowly constrained domains of study.

Groupware: A subset or a fork of CSCW?

According to Ellis, Gibbs, and Rein’s definition (“Groupware: Some Issues and Experiences,” p. 40) that groupware may be construed as merely an interface that supports agents (humans+machines) in a shared environment induces one to conclude that groupware must indeed be a subset of the broader CSCW, the objective of the latter being to provide a theoretical framework on top of related systems. In other words, we may view groupware as not specifically supporting cooperation or collaboration. This is one of the core issues of CSCW, as pointed out by Bannon and Schmidt’s “CSCW: Four Characters in Search of a Context” paper.

Ellis, Gibbs, and Rein believe, however, that from an artificial intelligence perspective, groupware may be beneficent if intelligent distributed systems are resorted to. In my previous post on CSCW, I allude to distributed multi-agent systems, wherein agents collaborate through their shared environment in order to attain a common objective. Such complex systems allow for self-organization, adaptation, evolution, etc., and this is one possible theoretical aim of CSCW independent of software tools, such as interfaces. Similarly, groupware could enhance its socio-technical aspect based on the AI perspective, but it would still remain a subset rather than a fork of CSCW for one simple reason: groupware deals with constructing interfaces that work per theoretical results CSCW frameworks (are expected to) yield.

Another point worth noting is the communications perspective (p. 44), according to which the authors claim distance does matter when it comes to distributing agent interactions beyond face-to-face ones. Their observation that face-to-face interaction can never be replaced may be construed as Olson & Olson’s view that distance matters and shall matter in eventual future technologies.