The impact of groupware and CSCW on group collaboration : an overview of success factors in CSCW

Organizations continuously explore new ways of supporting group collaboration. Group dynamics changed the moment organizations started to operate globally. Groups started to collaborate from different locations, and this caused the emergence of virtual teams and agile work. Microsoft is one of the companies that promises to support this new way of group collaboration. Organizations need new systems that connect distributed teams around the world. Groupware are computer-based systems that support groups of participants to achieve a common task in a shared environment. The focus of groupware is mainly on how the technology supports group collaboration. However, the technology alone is not interesting enough to be researched. The success of group collaboration is dependent on many more variables besides technology. Computersupported cooperative work (CSCW) is a research area that discusses the intersection between collaborative group behavior and computer-based technologies. It focusses on group behavior, group interaction, the work environment, and how computer-based systems can support those aspects. Even though CSCW was developed in the 1980s, it is still relevant today. The main research question of this paper is to find success factors of CSCW that support group collaboration. To answer the research question, literature is being reviewed, groupware is measured in use cases and interviews are conducted with Microsoft employees specialized in group collaboration systems. Results show that to support group collaboration, organizations should focus on active and dynamic participation of group members. Distributed organizations pulled groups apart and Passive group meetings in conference rooms are outdated and discourage collaboration. In addition, organizations must provide proper groupware to support common ground, grounding and group interaction

We Met at the Beach: Examining Sense of Community through Charity Sporting Events

Researchers have studied the social value of large-scale events in creating a sense of community but not the role small-scale charity sporting events play in fostering a sense of community. There is also a need to examine which managerial aspects may contribute to building a sense of community through small-scale charity sporting events. To focus on that gap in the literature, I utilized a micro-ethnographic approach to examine recreational charity beach volleyball tournaments held on Jeju Island, South Korea, hosted by the charity organization, ‘Jeju Furey’. As an organizer and participant of these beach volleyball tournaments, my insider’s perspective complements the perspectives of the participants to form an understanding of the value assigned to charity sporting events. The results of this study could help to enhance opportunities to develop charity sporting events, with the potentially fortuitous effect of enhancing a sense of community and the mutual benefit of being together

A framework for deflated and augmented Krylov subspace methods

We consider deflation and augmentation techniques for accelerating the convergence of Krylov subspace methods for the solution of nonsingular linear algebraic systems. Despite some formal similarity, the two techniques are conceptually different from preconditioning. Deflation (in the sense the term is used here) "removes" certain parts from the operator making it singular, while augmentation adds a subspace to the Krylov subspace (often the one that is generated by the singular operator); in contrast, preconditioning changes the spectrum of the operator without making it singular. Deflation and augmentation have been used in a variety of methods and settings. Typically, deflation is combined with augmentation to compensate for the singularity of the operator, but both techniques can be applied separately. We introduce a framework of Krylov subspace methods that satisfy a Galerkin condition. It includes the families of orthogonal residual (OR) and minimal residual (MR) methods. We show that in this framework augmentation can be achieved either explicitly or, equivalently, implicitly by projecting the residuals appropriately and correcting the approximate solutions in a final step. We study conditions for a breakdown of the deflated methods, and we show several possibilities to avoid such breakdowns for the deflated MINRES method. Numerical experiments illustrate properties of different variants of deflated MINRES analyzed in this paper.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figure