Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!pdxgate!awaken!p+t
From: p+t@awaken.UUCP (Peter+Trudy Johnson-Lenz)
Newsgroups: comp.groupware
Subject: Re: why so little groupware?
Message-ID: <219@awaken.UUCP>
Date: 22 Oct 90 21:10:39 GMT
References: <2997@jaytee.East.Sun.COM>
Organization: Awakening Technology, Lake Oswego OR
Lines: 64

Like David, we believe the lack of groupware is due in large part to the
difficulty of collaboration between software and social scientists with
different methodologies and purposes.  Ultimately, however, these differences
are a rich and vital source of creative, interdisciplinary potential.  As
wearers of both software and social science hats, we finding working with
both most fruitful.

We were drawn to this medium over a decade ago by the potential for
supporting group dynamics that we saw in Murray Turoff's tailorable EIES
(Electronic Information Exchange System) at the New Jersey Institute of
Technology.  Through our experience there we began to realize that tailoring
systems to fit group needs is a messy and labor-intensive process, much like
managing and facilitating a face-to-face group.

Like David's point that groupware is many people and at least one computer,
we increasingly understood Doug Engelbart's assertion that this was a
co-evolving human and tool system.  Our original 1978 definition of
groupware included both -- "intentional group processes plus software to
support them."

During the past three years, using our own tailorable system, we've
experimented a great deal with the messiness, or what might also be called
the inherent "fuzziness" of group interaction via computer.  In this
process, we discovered an array of six "groupware primitives" (context,
timing, rhythms, boundaries, containers, mechanisms) that satisfy
both our social science interest in group process and our computer science
interest in computable, orthogonal primitives.  In doing so, we realized
these primitives bridge the polarity between two prevailing
approaches to groupware:  1) groupware as mechanism that *makes* groups work,
and 2) groupware as context that *allows* self-organization to emerge.

This array of six primitives gives us tools to dynamically tailor a variety of
changing forms appropriate to a group at each stage in its evolution towards
a self-organizing learning team.  They are implemented through scripted
situated agents and a variety of arrangements of the "virtual furniture"
(communication structures).  Our tools are still crude and rudimentary, but
they allow us to work with the messiness more effectively than ever before.

We detail this work in our Research Report #4, "Rhythms, Boundaries, and
Containers:  Creative Dynamics of Asynchronous Group Life," available from
us for $10.  An abridged version will be published in the forthcoming
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MAN MACHINE STUDIES special issue on CSCW/groupware
under the title "Post-Mechanistic Groupware Primitives."

We are beginning to explore ways of distributing these groupware primitives
to workstations/PCs.  They are currently implemented on our server/host
system only in order to support a wide variety of PCs connecting over a
wide-area network using a variety of telecommunications software.  We are
looking for a development environment that will run on Macintoshes, DOS, and
OS/2 that includes a uniform GUI and telecommunications tools.  Smalltalk V
is the best we have found so far, but it is weak on telecommunications.  Any
suggestions?

Alas, while we don't have any commercial groupware to sell, we are
encouraged by the baby steps we've taken into this interdisciplinary
frontier and welcome collegial dialogue.

We expect it will take us all (at least) a few more years before any of us
*really* get the hang of groupware anyway (grin).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter+Trudy Johnson-Lenz, Awakening Technology, 695 Fifth, Lake Oswego, OR 97034
          (503) 635-2615 (voice);  uucp:  tektronix!pdxgate!awaken!p+t
   >>> creating groupware for a vital, sustainable culture in hyperspace <<<