Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of “space ” and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between “space ” and “place”. While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of “place ” which frames interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how “place”, rather than “space”, can support CSCW design.

A belief in the efficacy of imitating face-to-face communication is an unquestioned presupposition of most current work on supporting communications in electronic media. In this paper we highlight problems with this presupposition and present an alternative proposal for grounding and motivating research. and development that frames the issue in terms of needs, media, and mechanisms. To help elaborate the proposal we sketch a series of example projects and respond to potential criticisms. Keywords: Telecommunications, CSCW.

Workstations and personal computers are increasingly being delivered with the ability to handle multimedia data; more and more of us are linked by high-speed digital networks. With multimedia communication environments becoming more commonplace, what have we learned from earlier experiences with prototype media environments? This paper reports on some of our experiences as developers, researchers and users of flexible, networked, multimedia computer environments, or "media spaces". It focusses on the lessons we can learn from extended, long-term use of media spaces, with connections that last not hours or days, but months or years. We take as our starting point a set of assumptions which differ from traditional analytical perspectives. In particular, we begin from the position that that a real-world baseline is not always an appropriate point of comparison for new media technologies; that a set of complex and intricate communicative behaviours arise over time; and that media spaces c...

Abstract. Traditional techniques for balancing privacy and awareness in video media spaces, like blur filtration, have been proven to be ineffective for compromising home situations involving a media space. As such, this paper presents the rationale and prototype design of a context-aware home media space (HMS)—defined as an always-on video media space used within a home setting—that focuses on identifying plausible solutions for balancing privacy and awareness in compromising home situations. In the HMS design, users are provided with implicit and explicit control over their privacy, along with visual and audio feedback of the amount of privacy currently being maintained. 1

Abstract. The exploration of social networks is essential to find capable cooperators who can help problem-solving and to augment cooperation between workers in an organization. This paper describes PeCo-Mediator-II to seek for capable cooperators throuth a chain of personal connections (PeCo) in a networked organization. Moreover, this system helps to gather, explore, and visualize social networks in an organization. The experimental results show that the system facilitates users ’ encounters with cooperators and develops new helpful connections with the cooperators. Key words: Personal connections, on-line social networks, collaborative help networks, mediation, and software agents. Abbreviations: PeCo – Personal Connection 1.

models of information sharing, and runtime support based on those models, are by themselves incomplete for the task of constructing robust, practical collaborative applications. To be usable, we must provide a means for developers to access these facilities easily. This chapter has presented developer perspectives on the concepts introduced by Intermezzo. We have investigated a number of components of the developer support, or "toolkit," in this research, including notification, programming interfaces for accessing shared data, interfaces for accessing collaboration-specific functionality, and the use of scripting through embedded computation. Notification is one of the most important problems to be addressed in any developer support: how do applications (and, by extension, their users) become aware of changes in their environments? This problems is especially vexing in the case of coordination, where information that may be considered interesting is plentiful, change is rapid, and the...

This paper reports work done as part of the Large Interactive Display Surface(LIDS) project at the University of Waikato. One application of the LIDS equipment is distributed meeting support. In this context large display surfaces are used as shared workspaces by people at collaborating sites. A meeting will start with a shared presentation document, typically an agenda document with summary and detail on agenda items as required. During the meeting, annotations will be made on the shared document, and new pages will be added with notes and drawings.

harrison(llparc.xerox.com Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of “space ” and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between “space ” and “place”. While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of “place ” which fram-es interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how “place”, rather than “space”, can support CSCW design.

The exploration of social networks is essential to find capable collaborators who can help problem-solving and to augment cooperation between users. This paper describes PeCo-Mediator-II for seeking for a collaborator with the chain of personal connections (PeCo) in distributed organizations. Moreover, this system helps gathering, exploring, and visualizing social networks. The experimental results show that the system facilitates that learners encounter collaborators and develop a new helpful relationship beyond the classroom. Keywords: Collaborative learning, personal connections, on-line social networks, collaborative help networks, mediation, and software agents.

Matching the advance of computer networks, various computer systems for supporting collaborative work have been studied. Those systems often provide desktop conferencing tools for the support of business meetings. However, meetings are not always of a business or formal nature. Casual meetings such as chatting at a coffee break or in a passageway enrich our life. Though casual meetings also take an important role in collaboration, research has tended to ignore this aspect. We think that conventional desktop conferencing systems, which multicast pictures and voices, cannot support casual meetings. In such systems, the faces of all participants are always displayed, which strains conversation. Furthermore, those systems hinder many people from participating simultaneously. We have been developing a series of community support systems under the project Socia [Ishida 1994, 1997, Yamaki et al. 1996a]. The project aims at