CSCW and the WWW Panel

This panel aim was to present a CSCW perspective into Cooperative Work on Web, as well as questioning if the Web supports, or can support in the future, cooperation as well as other groupware tools such as LotusNotes.

During this panel, a CSCW and WWW taxonomic definition was discussed by exploring those definitions and searching for common factors that could facilitate Support for Cooperative Work on the Web. The proposed definition was as follows:

• CSCW
  • Communications - information flow; content and streams
  • Coordination - points of contact and articulation
  • Context - Coordinated around activity, not just context
• WWW
  • as a document repository - naming; storage; structure
  • as a user interface management system - relationship between interaction and retrieval
  • as a coordination device - structure versus data

The discussion evolved around these two perspectives, and mostly about the inadequacies of the Web for supporting cooperative work. Several points were raised why the Web is not adequate for the task in discussion, such as:

• it is a stateless engine - how can you represent context and sensitivity in a stateless machine
• HyperLinks are not typed - html does not support typed objects, which is necessary to create agents in a CSCW environment
• Access Control - WWW does not implement access control consistently, and one requirement for CSCW is the ability of controlling resources consistently within a group
• Privacy and Safety - WWW still has loopholes as far as safety and privacy are concerned
• Authoring tools - still very primitive, author must know html in order to create Web material
• Organisational Memory - as the Web is, it is not possible to keep track of Organisational Memory

Another conclusive point was that when its first design was devised the Web had as its underlying model, support for cooperation, and given its fast growth and the creation of several different servers, the Web has become a publishing vehicle, and has completely shifted its paradigm from collaborative work support to information provider.

The panel agrees that several changes in Web protocols and its architecture and standards are needed in order to better support collaboration, such as: content negotiation; style sheets; typed links.