• What are the goals of a groupware system?
Facilitation
Coordination
Cooperation
Augmented, supported production
• Is efficiency the goal?
-
How can you be efficient with things you don’t know about? (tacit knowledge)
Is hardware and software are only improvement?

• Goals defined before the system is sought or bought
• Knowledge Repository
• Connecting People, not just their knowledge
• Make knowledge shareable as you go
• Measure knowledge as part of performance
• Doesn’t depend on one thing or person
• Doesn’t do everything (at first?)
• Works with the culture, improves the culture
• Allows flexibility of people & the system(s)

• Knowledge Appliances
PIM, PKM, PVC
• What if everyone had Lotus Notes and knew how to use it?
• KM and economic efficiency
People-centric
People as k units?
• “A matter of economic faith”
• Categorization and Organization
Personal, Group, Corporate taxonomies?

• Real-time chat is more natural & informal than other choices (email, newsgroups)
• If used, may bring about more narrative or anecdotal knowledge
• “Outeraction” - communicative processes among each other & managing communication, not to explicitly exchange information
• Is it the right medium for the task or the available one?
• Easy to use, quick for coordination & scheduling
• Visibility of users gives extra information
Awareness, buddy lists, previous interactions
Asynchronous, but continual (a long, sporadic phone call)
• “It’s like working together, but not sharing an office”

• Butterfly uses IRC to build a database of content
• How much knowledge work can be done with interactive text?
Presence
Annotation
Conversation
• Recommending based on explicit queries
Reference Interviews?
• Combine help and normal conversation
Keywords for help, queries and updates

• How do you use or make sense of very large social interaction spaces?
Your own participation as anchor points
Dynamic views of topics and overall use
• “A key finding of collective action studies shows a mutual awareness of other participants’ histories and relationships is CRITICALTO A
COOPERATIVE OUTCOME”
• Watching threads of conversations helps with selection and understanding of the community
• How would this work for merely a large space?
One organization or group of people?

• This is an organizational based space
• Help for commonly asked questions
• Ad hoc, real-time help vs. a personal interaction?
Can a database replace a mentor?
Does the community react & change without novelty and use?
• Use experts to tune and provide answers
Interview-like questions
Routing to correct information or expert
• Incentives, Proofing & Alternative Answers

• Is simply sharing the answer?
• Is P2P the real difference?
Corporate policies
Personal reputation & accountability
• Drag and Drop to the Desktop
Personal connotation
Distributed storage (and retrieval)
• Uptime & replication
• Up to date, dynamic searching
• Ad hoc group coordination

• How about basic support for individual work first?
Applications
Training
• Web software is first platform for CSCW on the interenet
Will it be the last?
Will others use the network, not the applications?
Data stream exchange medium?
• Servers as shared workspaces
• Events and activity awareness
What’s new
-
Who’s working
• Let users control sharing and workgroups

• How relevant is this now?
• Agents as metaphor, not applications
• Customization
• Links among objects
• Sharing
Db
Objects
Mail?
• What’s right about this system?
• Is everything possible with Web standard applications and protocols?

• Finding help within the organization
• Just in time help
• Intricacies of locating expertise
• What if this scaled to the Web?
Validity of skill assessment
Meta data issues
• When do people need experts?
Situations, projects
General education
• Who’s busy?
• Technical Support

• 1996 View “how knowledge will be managed in 10 years”
• WWW & Lotus Notes
• Hypertext, Links & Repositories
• Agents for searching
• Organizational enthusiasm
• Commonplace KM practices by 2000
• Success & evaluation of KM work
• “Categorization and organization of knowledge will be a core competency of every firm”
Vocabulary, search tools, navigation aides
• More time working together

• Next Week
• Research Paper Updates