Documents in Place: Demarcating Places for Collaboration in Healthcare Settings

The notion of place often connotes our understood reality populated with people, practices, meanings, and artifacts. This paper suggests that documents, whether electronic, paper-based, or set in stone, offer important insights into how people establish and maintain places for communication and coordination. Data from an ethnographic study in a large hospital system illustrates how doctors carefully craft their medical histories in various electronic record systems to demarcate specific places for their communication and coordination with specific collaborators. Such documents serve as portable places, allowing the doctors to navigate a constantly changing landscape of relevant patients, participants, times, and spaces. The documents demarcate such places by pointing out the interdependencies among particular participants, places, and times. Doctors care deeply about these documents and they play a central part not only in securing efficient communication and coordination but also in the socialization of newcomers. A study of the complex interrelationships between documents and place, therefore, offers important insights into organizational environments characterized by distributed and mobile work practices.     

Collaboration Within Different Settings: A Study of Co-located and Distributed Multidisciplinary Medical Team Meetings

This paper reports our findings from a study of multidisciplinary team meetings for the treatment and ongoing management of breast cancer patients. The focus of the fieldwork was the meetings within and between a large group of multidisciplinary health professionals from two hospitals in Sydney, a large public teaching hospital and a much smaller private hospital. The paper examines the common work of the meetings and the variation within and between local practices and sites in the doing of this work, both in the local settings of each hospital and in the video-mediated setting when the local meetings are linked. Variations in the physical setup of the meetings, the presentation of the patient cases and the preparation of images used in patient discussion are identified, traced to their various sources and examined within their particular sociotechnical context. This is followed by a discussion of how local variation contributed to the particular challenges of the video-mediated meetings as experienced by the participants and how they might be addressed. Our motivations are to contribute both to the growing case studies of multidisciplinary team meetings within healthcare settings and to the important work being done to generate conceptual and design approaches that can support the development and successful use of CSCW technologies across highly variable local settings.     

基于角色的协作关系建模研究

群体协作机制研究与应用是计算机支持协同工作的重要研究内容之一,该文在基于角色的群体协作机制基础上,提出了一种角色协作关系建模方法。该建模方法通过创建一系列协作元素来描述角色协作关系,通过描述问题域、角色组织域和实体域来构造一个基于角色的群体协作环境。该文最后讨论了建模步骤和相关应用领域,探讨了下一步研究中需要解决的若干问题。     

基于角色的软件协作环境研究与实现

近年来，软件协作技术已成为基于Web的分布式软件服务计算环境的重要研究方向，在基于角色的群体协作机制和角色协作关系建模方法基础上，提出并设计实现了一个基于角色的软件协作环境，具体讨论了该环境的功能目标、工作原理、系统结构、实现机制和关键技术，最后讨论了该工作在协同电子商务系统中的应用情况，给出了下一步研究中需要解决的若干问题．     

Tailoring as Collaboration: The Mediating Role of Multiple Representations and Application Units

In this paper we see tailoring as indirectlong-term collaboration between developers and users:initiated by developers when they build softwaresystems, and responded to by end users when they latertailor the systems. We have identified two features weconsider important when supporting this kind ofcollaboration: multiple representations andapplication units. Their main benefit is that they canenhance communication between developers and users,hence making it easier for users to do the tailoring.We present two tailorable systems we have built totest these ideas. One of the systems (ECHOES) is acollaborative system based on multiplerepresentations, and the other system (BasicDraw) isan individual productivity tool based on multiplerepresentations and application units. We discusslessons learned from the two projects and suggestdirections for future work, including identifying somechallenges that need to be overcome in order to bringend-user tailoring out of the prototyping laboratoryand into user organizations.     

LaCOLLA: Middleware for Self-Sufficient Online Collaboration

The LaCOLLA middleware makes it possible for collaborators to interact using their own resources without depending on centralized regimes. By contributing their own resources, group members can organize and communicate using a federated peer-to-peer model. This lets the group function regardless of whether a member removes resources and despite network or node failures or disconnection. In turn, this capacity for self-organization, together with location transparency, lets application developers create self-sufficient applications for collaborative activity     

JASMINE: A Java Tool for Multimedia Collaboration on the Internet

Although collaboration tools have existed for a long time [8], Internet-based multimedia collaboration has recently received a lot of attention mainly due to easy accessibility of the Internet by ordinary users. The Java platform and programming language has also introduced yet another level of easy access: platform-independent computing. As a result, it is very attractive to use Java to design multimedia collaboration systems for the Internet. Today there are many systems, which use Java for multimedia collaboration. However, most of these systems require the shared Java application to be re-written according to the collaboration system's Application Programming Interface (API)—a task which is sometimes difficult or even impossible. In this paper, we describe a practical approach for transparent collaboration with Java. Our approach is transparent in that the Java application can be shared as is with no modifications. The main idea behind our system is that user events occurring through the interactions with the application can be caught, distributed, and reconstructed, hence allowing Java applications to be shared transparently. Our architecture allows us to make the huge installed base of Java applications collaborative, without any modification to their original code. We also prove the feasibility of our architecture by implementation of the JASMINE¹ prototype.     

Between Place and Interface: Designing Situated Sound for the iPhone

This article explores composition skills and modalities for locative, multimedia texts by reporting experiences from a locative iPhone application that plays church music and explains that music's history in churches in Rome, Italy. Using a research by design approach, we did three rounds of observation, paper sketches, and user testing of prototypes. We found that an effective locative text must be adapted to the place in which it is intended to be experienced. The locative text must be specific, possibly referring to what the audience can see or experience at the place, and thus it is important to know how people usually behave in that particular place. Images are of little relevance in a mobile guide, except for exterior shots, which may help users to locate interesting buildings. Sound is more effective than visual modes as it allows the audience to look around while listening. For the same reason, the user interface in mobile, locative applications need to be even easier to use than in other services as they invite the audience to move through space while interacting with the application.     

COLLAGEN: A Collaboration Manager for Software Interface Agents

We have implemented an application-independent collaboration manager, called Collagen, based on the SharedPlan theory of discourse, and used it to build a software interface agent for a simple air travel application. The software agent provides intelligent, mixed initiative assistance without requiring natural language understanding. A key benefit of the collaboration manager is the automatic construction of an interaction history which is hierarchically structured according to the user's and agent's goals and intentions.     

Scudware Mobile:支持可穿戴设备协同的移动中间件

最近几年可穿戴设备发展迅速,各种样式和用途的可穿戴设备大量出现。然而这些可穿戴设备大多都是独立工作的,设备与设备之间鲜有联系。为此提出了一个以智能手机为中心的、支持个人范围的和人与人之间的设备的协同模型。基于该模型设计并实现了Scudware Mobile移动中间件,该中间件运行于智能手机上,可以汇聚智能手机和可穿戴设备的数据和服务,且以开放授权机制开放给用户,实现了数据和服务的协同。在Scudware Mobile移动中间件的基础上实现了MobileTrace足迹记录器应用,验证了Scudware Mobile移动中间件的可用性。     

Community Collaboration for ERP Implementation

The paper discusses the enterprise resource planning (ERP).ERP implementation solves business problems by customizing and integrating off-the-shelf enterprise software packages. A successful ERP implementation involves extensive collaboration and communication among the customer, implementation consultancy, and software vendor. Collaboration allows implementation personnel from different organizations to utilize each other's experiences. An example of this is the Web 2.0. A Web 2.0 knowledge repository system can reduce costs, improve quality, and lower the risks of ERP implementations.Through the case study, the key desired features for Web 2.0 knowledge repository system to support ERP implementations were defined. Epics was designed to fulfill these requirements and developed a prototype. Epics can be used by software vendors, ERP consulting firms, and ERP users. Human aspects play a critical role in ERP implementation. ERP implementation quality depends largely on how the implementation personnel's knowledge and past experiences are reused and communicated. Although knowledge reuse, collaboration, and communication are important for all software projects, they're particularly critical in ERP implementation owing to its unique challenges.     

钻井生产协同系统的开发设计

本文给出了钻井生产企业如何能简单而快捷地设计适合自己的生产协同系统。对生产协同系统中的数据及其它事务中间层软件、统一用户平台、动态网页、生产业务流程流转与协同工作等四个方面如何设计编写进行深入的阐述。     

Collaboration Challenges: Bridging the IT Support Gap

The more collaborative enterprises are, the better they perform. However, current collaboration technologies do not contribute as much as expected to collaboration quality. Collaboration technology seems to be stuck in just overcoming the limitation of people not being in the same place at the same time. Real time communications are supported through such things as web-conferencing and instant messaging, while email, wikis, and web-based repositories provide the electronic equivalent of the shared file cabinet. Although some technologies support workflow and project management to a degree, there is little support for the joint development lifecycle of planning, creating, evaluating, negotiating, and consolidating group work. Focusing broadly on collaboration challenges highlights limitations of current technology and can help provide direction for the kinds of information technology that will be needed to bridge the IT support gap to meet current and future collaboration challenges.     

Edge Mashups for Service-Oriented Collaboration

This paper presents the Live Distributed Objects platform that makes it possible to combine hosted content with P2P protocols in a single object-oriented framework.     

钻井生产协同系统的开发设计

本文给出了钻井生产企业如何能简单而快捷地设计适合自己的生产协同系统。对生产协同系统中的数据及其它事务中间层软件、统一用户平台、动态网页、生产业务流程流转与协同工作等四个方面如何设计编写进行深入的阐述。     

Collaboration Among Designers: Analysing an Activity for System Development

Workplace studies provide an important input to system development, yet there is no straightforward way of translating empirical results into requirements. This study contributes to the development of methods by reporting an activity theory based approach consisting of (i) field observations, (ii) modelling and (iii) a specific task analysis for system requirements. The research informed the further development of the Build-it system, a multi-user system designed to support co-located interaction between designers in engineering and architecture, and other stakeholders such as clients, operators, or inhabitants. The background research was conducted in four engineering companies and comprised of meeting observations, a questionnaire on design collaboration (n=94) and the analysis of 20 artefacts. The findings indicate that collaboration is of critical importance to the design process, and at least some of the tasks in engineering design could be supported by a system like Build-it. The task analysis for system requirements involved potential users from engineering but extended the scope to other domains, namely architecture and chemical process engineering (n=22). In all three domains a multi-user system like Build-it would be advantageous; however, the specific requirements varied more than expected. The study critically reflects on the use of generic concepts and the process of conducting research for the purpose of understanding work for design.     

Designing Transparency for Effective Human-AI Collaboration

Information Systems Frontiers - The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing quickly, and systems can increasingly perform a multitude of tasks that previously required human...