Conference Program

Workshops

Lyn Bartram and Bo Begole, chairs

Saturday, November 4
09:00-18:00

Workshops provide an opportunity to discuss and explore emerging areas of CSCW research with a group of like-minded researchers and practitioners. The goal of the workshop is to share understandings and experiences, to foster research communities, to learn from each other and to envision future directions. Participation in workshops requires acceptance of a position paper. Submissions are due September 15, 2006. Workshops will last all day, with breaks as shown in the Program Overview.

W1: Media Space: Reflecting on 20 Years

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Location: Frontenac

Steve Harrison, Virginia Tech

Web site: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/MediaSpace.html

Since the first media spaces were created in the 1980's, technology has changed and affordable real-time desktop conferencing is a reality. But what happened to the ideas of the media space?

While there are ubiquitous cell-phone cameras, web-cams, iChat, architectural scale displays, the Internet, and globalized work, how do these current technologies and collaborative experiences look like and look different than those of a media space? What is the current state of systems that employ socially negotiated control instead of enforcing an established policy? What is the meaning of "awareness" and "presence" today? We encourage those who worked on the first media spaces and those who re-discover these ideas in current research to participate in a one day workshop held in conjunction with CSCW 2006 in Banff. Some topics include:

  • privacy
  • large scale display
  • awareness
  • telepresence
  • mobile awareness (IM)
  • video chat
  • social triangulation
  • coordination
  • distributed work
  • multi-player games
  • camera-projector integration research
  • IRVE's
  • media and related critical theory
  • space and place issues
  • and, of course, media space.

This workshop is inspired by an invitation to submit a book proposal on this topic to Springer's CSCW book series. To participate, send a two to four page position paper describing ongoing work, recent results, or opinions and approaches to the problem. We particularly seek significant unanswered questions and challenges to current paradigms that further media space research might address. Papers will be peer-reviewed and 15 will be selected. Papers should be sent to sharrison@vt.edu.

Advisory board:
Sara Bly, Sara Bly Consulting
Paul Dourish, UC Irvine
Robert Kraut, Carnegie-Mellon University
Tom Moran, IBM Almaden Research
Marilyn Mantei-Tremaine, Rutgers University
John Tang, IBM Almaden Research

Workshop contact and electronic submissions: sharrison@vt.edu

W2: Collaborating Over Paper and Digital Documents

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Location: Beatty

Paul Luff, King’s College London
Moira Norrie, ETH Zurich
Scott Klemmer, Stanford University
David McGee, Natural Interaction Systems

Web Site: http://www.copadd.ethz.ch

When observing everyday settings it is amazing how the use of the paper persists even when technologies are introduced to replace it. Paper seems to support collaboration in ways that sophisticated technologies cannot. Recently a number of technologies have been developed that seek to exploit the ‘affordances of paper’. These include displays with many of the visible and material qualities of paper, digital pens for capturing writing and drawing and other techniques that seek to take advantage of innovations in paper, ink, electronic imaging and detection devices. Although these technologies have not been developed with the specific aim of supporting collaboration, they seem to offer unique capabilities for supporting everyday work activities and interaction. We believe it is timely to hold a first international workshop to discuss the implications of such technologies for supporting collaborative work This will be of interest not only to those within CSCW, but also those with an interest in ubiquitous technologies, innovative support for new media, multi-modal interaction and particular domains such as publishing, education and healthcare

We invite researchers to this workshop from a wide range of disciplines including the social sciences, human-computer interaction, information sciences, ubiquitous computing and collaborative systems, as well as experts in paper, printing, digital pen and screen technologies. The workshop will consist of short presentations and demonstrations intended to inform participants of on-going projects and stimulate open discussion. One session will be devoted to technological innovations, one to studies and experience and one to future developments. Presentations will be selected based on reviews of submitted abstracts and all accepted abstracts will be published on a workshop web site (http://www.copadd.ethz.ch) before the workshop. This web site will also support on-line discussions and exchanges of information before and after the workshop. To help with planning we would appreciate an indication whether you would be interested in attending the Workshop by the 4th August.

Timetable
August 4, 2006: Expression of Interest
September 15, 2006: Workshop Abstracts due
September 29, 2006: Notification of Acceptance

Workshop contact and electronic submissions: copadd@inf.ethz.ch

W3: Mobile Multiplayer Games: Designs, Studies and Reflections

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Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow
Steve Benford, University of Nottingham

This workshop has been cancelled.

A number of researchers have used mobile multiplayer games either as a topic of study in itself or as a vehicle for more general investigations in computing, collaboration and information. Set within the context of increasing commercial significance of both games in general and mobile games in particular, this research has used the energy and ingenuity of players to test interfaces, infrastructure and design concepts, and to drive new technological developments. Commercial games are appearing that take advantage of commodity mobile phones’ burgeoning capabilities for interaction, awareness and collaboration. In-depth studies of mobile multiplayer games are also beginning to appear in greater numbers, and growing experience of design and use opens up new possibilities for conceptual work on the mixture of media, people and environments that constitute such games. This workshop’s aim is a broad view of this young research area, spanning and connecting system design, user studies and theoretical reflections.

W4: Collaborative Editing Systems

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Location: Norquay

Du Li (workshop chair, primary contact), Texas A&M University
Jeffrey D. Campbell, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
David Chen, Griffith University, Australia
Clarence (Skip) Ellis, University of Colorado
Ning Gu, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Claudia Ignat, ETH Zurich
Rui Li, Texas A&M University
Pascal Molli, LORIA,University of Nancy
Moira Norrie, ETH Zurich
Haifeng Shen, Nanyang Technological University
Chengzheng Sun, Nanyang Technological University

Web site: http://cocasoft.csdl.tamu.edu/~lidu/iwces8/

Collaborative editing is a classic topic in groupware and CSCW. Over the years, a plethora of group editors, both commercial products and research prototypes, have been developed and many are widely used. Group editing has become an important feature in modern office productivity tools and programming environments. Using group editors as the research vehicle, a wide range of technical and social issues have been investigated, including consistency control algorithms, groupware engineering methods, and usability of group editors. The workshop has been organized annually since 1999 in main CSCW conferences. The focus of this one is how to model operation intentions and maintain semantic consistency. As a convention, we also encourage contributions about engineering and usability issues in collaborative editing systems, especially Web-based systems.

Workshop contact and electronic submissions: lidu@cs.tamu.edu

W5: Awareness in Activity-Centric Groupware Design

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Location: Champain

Stacey Scott, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Michael Muller, IBM Research
Thomas Moran, IBM Research
Jakob Bardram, University of Aarhus
Bonnie Nardi, University of California, Irvine
Michael Wu, University of Toronto

Website: http://scripts.mit.edu/~sdscott/cscw_wiki/pmwiki.php

While research in CSCW has always been interested in understanding and facilitating collaborative activities, a recent trend in CSCW research has been to adopt an explicit "activity perspective" in the design of groupware systems. Such activity-centric groupware systems include explicit computational representations of work as activities, which can help improve planning, coordination, co-creation, reuse, and activity management during collaborative work. There are, however, many open questions related to the design of effective activity-centric groupware systems. For example, what are effective design techniques for determining what activity-related information the groupware system should provide? How should this information be displayed? What level of detail should be provided? Who should receive this information?

The goal of this workshop is to develop new research agendas for the concept of awareness of shared activities. This workshop will allow individuals with complementary research experiences to build a collective understanding of synchronous and asynchronous awareness issues in activity-centric groupware systems.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Design approaches for synchronous & asynchronous interaction: Interface and interaction designs to support realtime and asynchronous shared activities.
  • Technologies: Software architectures, protocols, distribution mechanisms, and user interface technologies for awareness in activity-based groupware design.
  • Supporting different roles: Working practices and designs to support different roles involved in collaboration.
  • Managing "flood" and "scatter": Working practices and designs for managing too much awareness information, focusing awareness services onto appropriate channels, and combining awareness information across diverse sources.
  • Application areas: Successful design techniques that have been used in specific activity domains.
  • Evaluation techniques: What are effective ways to evaluate the effectiveness of activity-centric groupware systems?
  • Theories and concepts: How can we conceptualize human activity?

We invite contributions from researchers, practitioners, and students examining any of the above (or related) research topics. Please refer to the workshop webpage for more details on submitting position papers. The workshop format will include brief presentations from each workshop attendee, brainstorming sessions, and small-group breakout sessions.

Workshop contact and electronic submission: Stacey Scott (e: sdscott@mit.edu, p: 1-617-258-5046)

W6: Design and CSCW

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Location: Paliser

Robert Woodbury, Simon Fraser University
Diane Gromala, Simon Fraser University
Mark Billinghurst, Canterbury University
Andrew Burrow, RMIT University
John Danahy, University of Toronto
Sara Diamond, Ontario College of Art and Design
Saul Greenberg, University of Calgary
Patrick Harrop, University of Manitoba

Design is both a domain of study and a source of expertise for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). As a domain of study it presents an iterative, cooperative work process; extensive use of formal digital representations and a complex power structure mediated by authority, contractual obligation and professional expertise.

Researchers in design present sources of expertise through extensive work and publication on supporting design teams and design students. Conversely, the (CSCW) research community presents to design research a large body of general work on the construction and understanding of systems for professional cooperation. The two domains of design and CSCW are largely separate, with a small number of researchers contributing to both communities. The purposes of this workshop are as follows:

  1. for design researchers to better understand the research questions and methods of the CSCW community (and vice versa);
  2. as a means to devise new research questions, to present a retrospective of exemplary systems for supporting cooperative work from both communities;
  3. to develop a shared characterization of the research problems in supporting design processes; and
  4. to foster better communication across design and CSCW.

We invite contributions from both the design and CSCW communities. We are particularly interested in

  • Concepts, models and tools for supporting distributed design work.
  • Studies of distributed design teams and processes.
  • Case studies of CSCW in design -- how design has used CSCW concepts and systems.
  • Case studies of design in CSCW -- how CSCW systems have been designed.

Workshop contact and submissions (by CSCW 2006 workshop position paper deadline): rw@sfu.ca

W7: Supporting the Social Side of Large-Scale Software Development

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Location: Coleman

Li-Te Cheng, IBM Research
Anthony Cox, Dalhousie University
Rob DeLine, Microsoft Research
Cleidson de Souza, Universidade Federal do Para
Kevin Schneider, University of Saskatchewan
Janice Singer, National Research Council of Canada
Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria
Gina Venolia, Microsoft Research

Web site: http://software-research.ca/social-se

Both the software engineering and the CSCW communities recognize that software development is a collaborative activity, and much recent research has begun to appear in this domain. In this full-day workshop, we plan to explore the social side of software development with an emphasis on tool support and a focus on large-scale projects such as open source, commercial, and government projects. Through a series of brief presentations and interactive sessions, we seek to increase awareness and knowledge of current social issues of software development, identify different kinds of tools that can support collaborative and social activities in software development, exchange ideas and experiences on how to evaluate collaborative software development tools, and to build a cross-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry.

Workshop contact and electronic submissions: Li-Te Cheng, IBM Research, li-te_cheng at us.ibm.com

W8: Mash-ups and CSCW: opportunities and issues

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Location: Angus

M. Cameron Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Michael B. Twidale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Web site: http://mashworks.net/

Web mash-ups offer new ways to explore design spaces and to create very rapid innovative prototypes. They involve at least two kinds of collaborative work:

  1. being a collaborative design activity themselves, as they draw on the work of others, and in some cases involve collaborative development in the style of open source software
  2. providing a rapid prototyping platform for exploring and refining CSCW applications and components that are fast and cheap enough to develop to enable very rapid iterations and informal or participatory evaluations.

We believe that web mashups and related technologies are poised to fundamentally redefine CSCW, both in terms of user behavior and activities, and the ways in which researchers conduct research. The workshop will aim to address the following questions:

  • What is special about mashups?
  • How are they constructed?
  • How come they are so effective for prototyping?
  • To what extent is mashup creation a collaborative activity?
  • What is the relationship between mashup development processes and those of open source development?
  • How can mashups be used in prototyping and evaluating collaborative applications?

We shall create an opportunity in the morning session for those with systems development skills to learn about and to publicly develop a mashup, and for other workshop participants to observe the mashup development process. An analysis of that experience will lead into the afternoon session where we will map out the research topics that relate mashups and CSCW.

Workshop contact and electronic submissions: mjones2@uiuc.edu

W9: Revisiting Online Trust: Concepts, Implications, and Future Directions

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Location: McKenzie

Qiping Zhang, Long Island University
John C. Thomas, IBM T. J. Watson
Dianne Cyr, Simon Fraser
S. Joon Park, Drexel University

Web site: http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/qzhang/cscw06/

Trust is an essential component in many aspects of our daily lives and is emerging as an increasingly important strategic concept for social computing communities. The concept of online trust is not just important for websites that promote products, services, or companies, but is also vital for any virtual activities where collaborations, exchanges, and opportunistic behaviors exist. Traditionally, online trust has been actively studied in the domains of virtual collaborations, online transactional activities, and social networking, but it has been inherently difficult to approach because trust depends on a large number of factors that cannot be easily modeled.

The goal of this workshop is to move beyond the many current conflicting conceptualizations of trust and move toward a broad consensus concerning both trust constructs and design criteria in developing trustworthy social and computational systems. At the workshop, we plan to explore important aspects of trust in various socio-technical settings by providing a forum to discuss

  • concepts and terms related to online trust,
  • design guidelines or patterns for developers of online environments,
  • innovative research questions and strategies,
  • policy implications,
  • case studies and sample URLs,
  • personal stories relating to online trust.

Ultimately, we hope to facilitate and form collaborations among researchers and developers working in the domain of online trust by providing situation-based cases with theoretical and practical implications from both academia and the private sector.

Workshop contact and electronic submissions: Qiping.Zhang@liu.edu

W10: Role-Based Collaboration

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Location: Empress

Haibin Zhu, Nipissing University
MengChu Zhou, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Website: http://www.nipissingu.ca/roles

Role-Based Collaboration (RBC) is an approach that can be used to integrate the theory of roles into Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) systems and other computer-based systems. It consists of a set of concepts, principles, mechanisms and methods. RBC imposes challenges and benefits not found in traditional CSCW systems. This research will bring exciting improvements to the development and the application of CSCW systems and the methodologies of collaboration.

From the role theory developed by social psychologists, we know that there are requirements for tools to facilitate roles and interaction among roles. With computer-supported tools, roles can help people in both long-term and short-term collaboration. At the same time, there are many challenges.

We may encounter in usability such questions as:

  • Do people enjoy working in an environment with roles clearly tagged?
  • Do people enjoy working with process-roles or interface-roles?
  • Do people enjoy working with people or with roles?

We may encounter the following questions in CSCW systems:

  • How do we present roles with HCI design?
  • How do we remind people of their roles?
  • How do we evaluate collaboration effectiveness?
  • How do we support negotiating roles?
  • How do we build role hierarchy?
  • How do we schedule people with different roles?

In this workshop, we invite position papers on one or more of the following themes:

  • Role concepts and their applications in organizations and management
  • The role of roles in face-to-face collaboration
  • The usability improvement based on roles
  • Resolution of role conflict in face-to-face collaboration with computer systems
  • Fundamental concepts and components in role-based collaboration
  • Role management in CSCW systems
  • Frameworks for role-based collaboration
  • Role-based coordination, conflict resolution, adaptive user interface design, and software development
  • Applications of role-based approaches

Workshop contact and electronic submissions: haibinz@nipissingu.ca