Plenary Panel

"Twenty Years of CSCW - What Have We Learned?"

Irene Greif (Moderator), Jonathan Grudin, Thomas Malone, Judith Olson, and Lucy Suchman

The first CSCW conference was held in December 1986 in Austin, Texas. Twenty years later, the world has changed: cell phones and wireless are everywhere; email and instant messaging are taken for granted; academic research, school kids' homework, buying and selling anything from a book to a boat are done regularly via the web; people routinely work in global teams with people they may never have met. Is CSCW the right approach to the latest challenges of globalization of work? Or to the increasingly blurred boundaries of work and home life for people who are always connected? What's left to do? Can we even say just what CSCW is today? Is it the blending of the social sciences and computer science that some of us hoped for at the outset? Does it scale from small team studies to large organizations?

In honor of the 20th anniversary of CSCW, we've assembled a panel, moderated by one of the founders of the field, and comprised of research leaders in this and related fields, representing different perspectives and ready to discuss and debate these questions. They will look at the role CSCW research played in the transformation of the past 20 years, as well as the impact that these changes will have on the future of the field.

About the Panelists

Irene Greif (Moderator)

Irene Greif heads the Collaborative User Experience Group (CUE) in IBM Reseaerch. This team of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) researchers is located in Cambridge, MA and works closelywith Lotus and IBM's Software Group. Irene is a former faculty member of Computer Science at University of Washington and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She was program chair of CSCW 1986 and Conference Chair of CSCW 1988 and has attended all the CSCW conferences.

Jonathan Grudin

Jonathan Grudin works in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was Professor of Information and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. He has attended every CSCW conference since 1986.

Thomas Malone

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the book The Future of Work. In addition, Professor Malone has published over 75 articles, research papers, and book chapters; he is an inventor with 11 patents; and he is the co-editor of three books: Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology, Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, and Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook.

Judith Olson

Judy Olson is the Richard W. Pew Professor of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Information, the Ross School of Business, and the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She also is currently serving as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Information. Judy has written extensively in both HCI and CSCW, most recently on how technologies and new social practices can help people who have to work at a distance--telecommuters, virtual teams, science collaborators. She is a founding member of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW), a member of the CHI Academy, and recently, with her husband and collaborator, Gary, holder of the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lucy Suchman

Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. She is also the Co-Director of Lancaster's Centre for Science Studies. Before her post at Lancaster University, she spent twenty years as a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Lucy served as Program Chair for the Second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '88).

Irene Greif

Jonathan Grudin

Thomas Malone

Judith Olson

Lucy Suchman