Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

SAGA reloaded: towards a generic platform for developing cooperative applications

Groupware specification and development has always been a complex task, requiring special attention to issues such as notification of cooperative actions and ensuring consistency of shared data. Some years ago SAGA was developed as a framework to build groupware applications based on a set of core web services that provide the most common cooperative functionalities. Despite its potential, the last few years brought some technological developments that placed new challenges. This paper presents a new generation of the SAGA platform that adds to the original framework features that emerged recently, namely the regulation of social interaction, incorporation of new communication technologies, connectors to several external services and interaction environments, and the addition of contextual information

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

Support for End User Participation using Replicated Versions and Group Communication

Article dans revue scientifique avec comité de lecture./http://portal.acm.org/We present Tuamotu, a prototype software system for the support of engineering projects distributed over the Internet. This system offers basic services for sharing persistent data between distant activities cooperating in a design project. It is based on replicating versions at each of the participant sites with the use of an atomic multicast mechanism and includes concepts for structuring the cooperation space. The application of these concepts to end-user support in design projects is discussed

TuaMotu: Support for Telecooperative Engineering Applications using Replicated Versions

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture./http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~ice/igroup/proceedings/canals.docThis paper presents Tuamotu, a prototype system for the support of cooperative engineering project distributed over the internet. The architecture of Tuamotu is introduced. We then focus on the mechanisms the system provides for the structuring of the cooperation space. The use of these structuring concepts to support end-user envolvement in design projets is finally discussed

Design Analytics Dashboards to Support Students and Instructors

Design coursework is iterative and continuously-evolving. Separation of digital tools used in design courses disaffects instructors’ and students’ iterative process experiences. As technology becomes increasingly integrated into design education, new opportunities arise for supporting the iterative, living process of design. These opportunities include providing on-demand, automatically computed insights to instructors, and facilitating instructor and student communication of feedback. I present a system that integrates support for design ideation with a learning analytics dashboard. The system enables instructors gain insights into a student's work across multiple dimensions. Instructors can view design work in the same environment in which students create it, which allows them to provide assessment and feedback in-context. I conducted semi-structured interviews, and recorded interaction logs over the course of an academic year to understand users' experiences. My research contributes to our understanding of how to present interactive, on-demand insights to instructors, as well as how to facilitate communication in an iterative process between instructors and students. Findings indicate benefits when systems enable instructors to contextualize creative work with assessment by integrating support for ideation with a learning analytics dashboard. Instructors are better able to track students and their work. Students are supported in reflecting on the relationship between assignments, and contextualizing instructor feedback with their work. We derive implications for contextualizing design with feedback to support creativity, learning, and teaching