Computer-supported collaboration
Research into computer-supported collaboration or cooperative work is the theoretical study of what is sometimes called workgroup computing (a term which shifts the focus from the work being supported to the technology and restricts it to small organizational units) or groupware (a term which focuses on commercial technologies, while CSCW addresses research into experimental systems and into the nature of workplaces and organizations). Today the technology is called social software and it has manifestations as netnews, email, chat and wiki. Of these, the last is most focused on collaboration.
ACM conferences
The Computer Supported Cooperative Work' conferences are held by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction every two years, in the fall. The most recent was in 2004. Prior conferences were in 2002, 2002, 1998, 1996, 1994, 1992, 1990, 1988, 1986 and 1984. The conference series began when, according to Jonathan Grudin: "Paul Cashman and Irene Grief organized a workshop of people from various disciplines who shared an interest in how people work, with an eye to understanding how technology could support them. They coined the term computer-supported cooperative work to describe this common interest... thousands of researchers and developers have been drawn to it."
According to Grudin, "an earlier approach to group support, Office Automation, had run out of steam. The problems were not primarily technical, although technical challenges certainly existed. The key problem was understanding system requirements. In the mid-1960's, tasks such as filling seats on airplane flights or printing payroll checks had been translated into requirements that resulted (with some trial and error) in successful mainframe systems. In the mid-1970s, minicomputers promised to support groups and organizations in more sophisticated, interactive ways: Office Automation was born. Single-user applications such as word processors and spreadsheets succeeded; office automation tried to integrate and extend these successes to support groups and departments. But what were the precise requirements for such systems?" This required social sciences: psychology, anthropology, sociology, and of course management science and other business disciplines.
Related fields
Other pioneers in the field included Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Austin Henderson, Lucy Suchman, Bill Buxton, and many "economists, social psychologists, anthropologists, organizational theorists, educators, and anyone else who can shed light on group activity." Applications of special concern were:
- desktop conferencing and videoconferencing systems,
- collaborative authorship such as Wikipedia itself applies
- electronic meeting rooms or other live group support systems
Also related are "Computer-Assisted Design/Computer-Assisted Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), Computer-Assisted Software Engineering (CASE), concurrent engineering, workflow management, distance learning, telemedicine, and the real-time network conferences called MUDs (after "multi-user dungeons," although they are now used for more than game-playing).