Computer-supported collaboration

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Computer-supported collaboration (CSC) research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working relationships. As net technology increasingly supported a wide range of recreational and social activities, consumer markets expanded the user base, enabling more and more people to connect online to create what researchers have called a computer supported cooperative work, which includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music" (from CSCW 2004).

Scope of the field[edit]

Focused on output[edit]

The subfield computer-mediated communication deals specifically with how humans use "computers" (or digital media) to form, support and maintain relationships with others (social uses), regulate information flow (instructional uses), and make decisions (including major financial and political ones). It does not focus on common work products or other "collaboration" but rather on "meeting" itself, and on trust. By contrast, CSC is focused on the output from, rather than the character or emotional consequences of, meetings or relationships, reflecting the difference between "communication" and "collaboration".

Focused on contracts and rendezvous[edit]

Unlike communication research, which focuses on trust, or computer science, which focuses on truth and logic, CSC focuses on cooperation and collaboration and decision making theory, which are more concerned with rendezvous and contract. For instance, auctions and market systems, which rely on bid and ask relationships, are studied as part of CSC but not usually as part of communication.

The term CSC emerged in the 1990s to replace the following terms:

  • workgroup computing, which emphasizes technology over the work being supported and seems to restrict inquiry to small organizational units.
  • groupware, which became a commercial buzzword and was used to describe popular commercial products such as Lotus Notes. Check here for a comprehensive literature review.
  • computer supported cooperative work, which is the name of a conference and which seems only to address research into experimental systems and the nature of workplaces and organizations doing "work", as opposed, say, to play or war.

Collaboration is not software[edit]

Two different types of software are sometimes differentiated:

Base technologies such as netnews, email, chat and wikis could be described as "social", "collaborative" or both or neither. Those who say "social" seem to focus on so-called "virtual community" while those who say "collaborative" seem to be more concerned with content management and the actual output. While software may be designed to achieve closer social ties or specific deliverables, it is hard to support collaboration without also enabling relationships to form, and hard to support a social interaction without some kind of shared co-authored works.[citation needed]

May include games[edit]

Accordingly, the differentiation between social and collaborative software may also be stated as that between "play" and "work". Some theorists hold that a play ethic should apply, and that work must become more game-like or play-like in order to make using computers a more comfortable experience.[citation needed] The study of MUDs and MMRPGs in the 1980s and 1990s led many to this conclusion, which is now not controversial.[citation needed]


Not just about "computing"[edit]


This larger definition of "computing", in which not just the data, or the metadata, or the context of the data, but the computer itself is being "processed", makes the term "social computing" have a whole different meaning.[citation needed]

Requires protocols[edit]

Communication essential to the collaboration, or disruptive of it, is studied in CSC proper.[citation needed] It is somehow hard to find or draw a line between a well-defined process and general human communications.[citation needed]


Basic tasks[edit]

Tasks undertaken in this field resemble those of any social science, but with a special focus on systems integration and groups:[1]

Less ambitiously, specific CSC fields are often studied under their own names with no reference to the more general field of study, focusing instead on the technology with only minimal attention to the collaboration implied, e.g. video games, videoconferences.[citation needed] Since some specialized devices exist for games or conferences that do not include all of the usual boot image capabilities of a true "computer", studying these separately may be justified. There is also separate study of e-learning, e-government, e-democracy and telemedicine.[citation needed] The subfield telework also often stands alone.


Early research[edit]









In the 1990s, the rise of broadband networks and the dotcom boom presented the internet as mass media to a whole generation. By the late 1990s, VoIP and net phones and chat had emerged. For the first time, people used computers primarily as communications, not "computing" devices. This, however, had long been anticipated, predicted, and studied by experts in the field.




Politics and business[edit]

In this century, the focus has shifted to sociology, political science, management science and other business disciplines. This reflects the use of the net in politics and business and even other high-stakes collaboration situations, such as war.



Current research[edit]

Current research in computer-supported collaboration includes:

Speech Recognition[edit]


Link semantics[edit]

HTML supports simple link types with the REL tag and REV tag. Some standards for using these on the WWW were proposed, most notably in 1994, by people very familiar with earlier work in SGML. However, no such scheme has ever been adopted by a large number of web users, and the "semantic web" remains unrealized. Attempts such as have sometimes collapsed totally.

Identity and privacy[edit]


Online identity and privacy concerns, especially identity theft, have grown to dominate the CSCW agenda in more recent years. The separate Computers, Freedom and Privacy conferences deal with larger social questions, but basic concerns that apply to systems and work process design tend still to be discussed as part of CSC research.

Online decision making[edit]


Team consensus decision making in software engineering, and the role of revision control, revert, reputation and other functions, has always been a major focus of CSC: There is no software without someone writing it. Presumably, those who do write it must understand something about collaboration in their own team. This design and code, however, is only one form of collaborative content.

Collaborative content[edit]


By the late 1990s, with the rise of wikis (a simple repository and data dictionary that was easy for the public to use), the way consensus applied to joint editing, meeting agendas and so on had become a major concern. Different wikis adopted different social and pseudopolitical structures to combat the problems caused by conflicting points of view and differing opinions on content.]].[citation needed]



Study of content management, enterprise taxonomy and the other core instructional capital of the learning organization has become increasingly important due to ISO standards and the use of continuous improvement methods.[citation needed] Natural language and application commands tend to converge over time, becoming reflexive user interfaces.[citation needed]

Telework and human capital management[edit]


The role of social network analysis and outsourcing services like e-lance, especially when combined in services like LinkedIn, is of particular concern in human capital management—again, especially in the software industry, where it is becoming more and more normal to run 24x7 globally distributed shops.

Related fields[edit]

Related fields are collaborative product development, CAD/CAM, computer-aided software engineering (CASE), concurrent engineering, workflow management, distance learning, telemedicine, medical CSCW and the real-time network conferences called MUDs (after "multi-user dungeons," although they are now used for more than game-playing).

See also[edit]


  1. ^ CSCW 2004 tutorials

External links[edit]

  • SPARC - Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory.
  • [1] - CSCW and Groupware Literature Guide: Randy's Reviews, Recommendations, and (Optional) Referrals.