Technical and Environmental Challenges of Collaboration Engineering in Distributed Environments

Collaboration in distributed settings has become a reality in organizational life. Yet we still have much to learn about issues inherent to distributed collaboration. One important area of study is the integration of Collaboration Engineering in distributed virtual teams for helping them in structuring their interaction. The field of Collaboration Engineering offers promising guidelines for process structures, but its application in distributed arenas is just beginning to be studied. We report on the design and development of a new collaboration environment for the incorporation of Collaboration Engineering principles, as well as the results of an initial study that examined leadership and process structure effects on the development of shared understanding. The paper describes the research motivation, the environment, and the results of the study, including an analysis of participants’ feedback and their message exchanges. We discuss both technical and environmental challenges for research on Collaboration Engineering in distributed environments

Combining Activity Theory and Grounded Theory for the Design of Collaborative Interfaces

In remote tabletop collaboration multiple users interact with the system and with each other. Thus, two levels of interaction human-computer interaction and human-human interaction exist in parallel. In order to improve remote tabletop systems for multiple users both levels have to be taken into account. This requires an in-depth analysis achieved by qualitative methods. This paper illustrates how a combination of Activity Theory and Grounded Theory can help researchers and designers to improve and develop better collaborative interfaces. Findings reported here are based on three video recordings that have been collected during a quasi-experiment