Компьютерная поддержка совместной работы: Исследования и технологии

Field studying how people work in groups with the support of computing systems

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) is the study of how people utilize technology collaboratively, often towards a shared goal. CSCW addresses how computer systems can support collaborative activity and coordination. More specifically, the field of CSCW seeks to analyze and draw connections between currently understood human psychological and social behaviors and available collaborative tools, or groupware. Often the goal of CSCW is to help promote and utilize technology in a collaborative way, and help create new tools to succeed in that goal. These parallels allow CSCW research to inform future design patterns or assist in the development of entirely new tools.

The origins of CSCW as a field are intertwined with the rise and subsequent fall of office automation as response to some of the criticisms, particularly the failure to address the impact human psychological and social behaviors can have. Greif and Cashman created the term CSCW to help employees seeking to further their work with technology. A few years later, in 1987, Dr. Charles Findley presented the concept of Collaborative Learning Work. Computer supported cooperative work is an interdisciplinary research area of growing interest which relates workstations to digitally advanced networking systems. The first technologies were economically feasible, but their interoperability was lacking which makes understanding a well tailored supporting system difficult. Due to global markets, more organizations are being pushed to decentralize their corporate systems. When faced with the complexities of today's business issues, a significant effort must be made to improve manufacturing systems' efficiency, improve product quality, and reduce time to market. The idea of CSCW or computer supported cooperative work has become useful over the years since its inception and most especially in the ongoing crisis of the COVID 19 pandemic. The measures to mitigate the virus’ spread have led to firm closures and increased the rates of remote working and learning. People now share a common workspace, hold virtual meetings, see and hear each other's movements and voices in a common virtual workspace with a group centered design. Only when advanced and generic methods are combined does a CSCW framework seem complete to the consumer. For decades, CSCW studies have been proposed using a variety of technologies to promote collaborative work, ranging from shared data services to video mediated networks for synchronous operations. Among the various domains of CSCW, the Audio/Video Conference Module (AVM) has become useful in enabling audiovisual communication via the online applications used to discuss and undertake work operations such as Zoom and EzTalks.

CSCW is a design oriented academic field that is interdisciplinary in nature and brings together librarians, economists, organizational theorists, educators, social psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and computer scientists, among others. The expertise of researchers in various and combined disciplines help researchers identify venues for possible development. Despite the variety of disciplines, CSCW is an identifiable research field focused on understanding characteristics of interdependent group work with the objective of designing adequate computer based technology to support such cooperative work. Essentially, CSCW goes beyond building technology itself and looks at how people work within groups and organizations, as well as the impacts of technology on those processes. CSCW has ushered in a great extent of melding between social scientists and computer scientists. These scientists work together to overcome both technical and non technical problems within the same user spaces. For example, many R&D professionals working with CSCW are computer scientists who have realized that social factors play an important role in the development of collaborative systems. On the flip side, many social scientists who understand the increasing role of technology in our social world become "technologists" who work in R&D labs developing cooperative systems. Over the years, CSCW researchers have identified a number of core dimensions of cooperative work. A non exhaustive list includes:
Awareness: individuals working together need to be able to gain some level of shared knowledge about each other's activities. Articulation work: cooperating individuals must be able to partition work into units, divide it amongst themselves and, after the work is performed, reintegrate it. Appropriation (or tailorability): how an individual or group adapts a technology to their own particular situation; the technology may be appropriated in a manner completely unintended by the designers. These concepts have largely been derived through the analysis of systems designed by researchers in the CSCW community, or through studies of existing systems (for example, Wikipedia). CSCW researchers that design and build systems try to address core concepts in novel ways. However, the complexity of a domain can make it difficult to produce conclusive results.

Articulation work is essentially the work that makes other work exist and possible. It is an effort made to make other work easier, more manageable, and can either be planned or unplanned. Therefore articulation work is an integral part of software process since software processes can sometimes fail or break down. Articulation work is also commonly known as "invisible work" since it is not always noticed. The concept was introduced by Anselm Strauss. He described it as a way to observe the "nature of mutually dependent actors in their division of labour". It was introduced in CSCW by Schmidt and Bannon in 1992, where it would be applied to more realistic work scenarios in society. There are various models of articulation work that help identify applicable solutions to recover or reorganize planned activities. It is also important to note that it can vary depending on the scenario. Oftentimes there is an increase in the need for articulation work as the situation becomes more complex. Because articulation work is so abstract, it can be split into two categories from the highest level: individual activity and collective activity. In a teamwork setting, articulation is imperative for collective activity. To maximize the efficiency of all the people working, the articulation work must be very solid. Without a solid foundation, the team is unable to collaborate effectively. Furthermore, as the size of the team increases, the articulation work becomes more complex. What goes in between the user and the system is often overlooked. But software process modeling techniques as well as the model of articulation work is imperative in creating a solid foundation that allows for improvement and enhancement. In a way, all work needs to be articulated; there needs to be a who, what, where, when and how. With technology, there are many tools that utilize articulation work. Tasks such as planning and scheduling can be considered articulation work. There are also times when the articulation work is bridging the gap between the technology and the user. Ultimately, articulation work is the means that allows for cooperative work to be cooperative, a main objective of CSCW.

One of the most common ways of conceptualizing CSCW systems is to consider the context of a system's use. One such conceptualization is the CSCW Matrix, first introduced in 1988 by Johansen; it also appears in Baecker (1995). The matrix considers work contexts along two dimensions: whether collaboration is co located or geographically distributed, and whether individuals collaborate synchronously (same time) or asynchronously (not depending on others to be around at the same time).

The Model of Coordinated Action, as a framework for analyzing group collaboration, identifies several dimensions of common features of cooperative work that extend beyond the CSCW matrix and allow for more complexity in describing how teams work given certain conditions. The seven total dimensions that constitute the model (MoCA) are used to describe essential “fields of action” seen in existing CSCW research. Rather than existing as a rigid matrix with distinct quadrants, this model is to be interpreted as multidimensional – each dimension existing as its own continuum. These ends of these dimensions’ continuums are defined in the following subsections.

Standardization is defined as “agile processes that are enforced as a standard protocol across an organization to share knowledge and best practice.” Flexibility, on the other hand, is the "ability to customize and evolve processes to suit the aims of an agile team". Everything that is done on the internet has a level of standardization due to the internet standards. In fact, Email has its own set of standards, of which the first draft was created in 1977. No CSCW tool is perfectly flexible, and all lose flexibility in the same three levels. Either flexibility is lost when the programmer makes the toolkit, when the programmer makes the application, and/or when the user uses the application.

Information infrastructure requires extensive standardization to make collaboration work. Since data is transferred from company to company and occasionally nation to nation, international standards have been put in place to make communication of data much simpler. Often one company’s data will be included in a much larger system, and this would become almost impossible without standardization. With information infrastructure, there is very little flexibility in potential future changes. Due to the fact that the standards have been around for decades and there are hundreds of them, it is nearly impossible to change one standard without greatly affecting the others. Technology enhanced learning, or “e learning”, has been an increasingly relevant topic in education, especially with the development of the COVID 19 pandemic that has caused many schools to switch to remote learning. E learning is defined as "the use of technology to support and enhance learning practice". It includes the utilization of many different types of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and is limited to the use of intranet and internet in the teaching and learning process. The development of content is mainly through using learning objectives to create activities through Virtual Learning Environments, Content Management Systems, and Learning Management Systems.

E learning has been explained by the community of inquiry (COI) framework introduced by Garrison et al. In this framework, there are three major elements: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. Cognitive presence in this framework is the measure of how well meaning is able to be constructed from the content being taught. It assumes that students have access to a large network from which to gain information from. Video conferencing has been shown to increase social presence within students. One study found that "social presence in VC [Virtual Conferencing] can have a positive effect on group efficacy and performance by amplifying group cohesion". This information is greatly useful in designing future systems because it explains the importance of technology like video conferencing in synchronous e learning. Groups that are able to see each other face to face have a stronger bond and are able to complete tasks faster than those without it. In addition, it may be difficult for older teachers to utilize such technology, and communicate with their students. Similar to orienting older workers with CSCW tools, it is difficult to train younger students or older teachers in utilizing virtual technology, and may not be possible for widely spread virtual classrooms and learning environments.

Collaborative mixed reality games modify the shared social experience, during which players can interact in real time with physical and virtual gaming environments and with other multiplayer video gamers. This may be done through any means of communication, self representation, and collaboration.

The group members experience effective communication practices following the availability of a common platform for expressing opinions and coordinating tasks. The technology is applicable not only in professional contexts but also in the gaming world. CSCW usually offers synchronous and asynchronous games to allow multiple individuals to compete in a certain activity across social networks. Thus, the tool has made gaming more interesting by facilitating group activities in real time and widespread social interactions beyond geographical boundaries.

HCI, CSCW, and game studies in MMORPGs highlight the importance of avatar mediated self presentation in player experience. These studies have put together known two components of self presentation in games. First, through personal choice and personalization of avatars, various social values (such as gender roles and social norms) are integrated and reflected in the player's self image. Second, self presentation in games conjointly options experimentation of fully new identities or reaffirmation of existing identities. This includes cross gender play and queerness gameplay. Computer mediated communication in gaming settings takes place across different channels, which can consist of structured message systems, bulletin boards, meeting rooms, and shared diaries. By incorporating Guilds, World of Warcraft creates opportunities for players to work together with their team members who can be from anywhere in the world. WOW players who are associated with a Guild are more likely to play and do quests with the same Guild mates each time which develops a strong bond between players and a sense of community. Positive Interdependence is the dependence of collaboration from members of a group in order to accomplish a task. In video games, this is the idea of players on a team or in a group understanding that working together is beneficial, and that the success and failure of the group is shared equally if all members participate. This coupled with their relative ease of transport makes mobile devices usable in a large variety of settings which other computing devices would not function as well. WeChat is able to enhance healthcare interactions between patient and doctor by allowing direct communication of the patient's symptoms. Often, these social systems focus key functionality and feature creation for younger demographics, causing issues in adaptability for older generations. In addition, with the lack of scalability for these features, the tools are not able to adapt to fit evolutional needs of generations as they age. With the difficulty for older demographics to adopt these intergenerational virtual platforms, the risk of social isolation is increased in them. While systems have been created specifically for older generations to communicate amongst one another, system design frameworks are not complex enough to lend to intergenerational communication.

Along the lines of a more collaborative modality is something called ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing was first coined by Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC. This was to describe the phenomenon of computing technologies becoming prevalent everywhere. A new language was created to observe both the dynamics of computers becoming available at mass scale and its effects on users in collaborative systems. Between the use of social commerce apps, the rise of social media, and the widespread availability of smart devices and the Internet, there is a growing area of research within CSCW that how come out of these three trends. These topics include ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) within social media, ubiquitous computing, and instant message based social commerce.

In You Recommend I Buy: How and Why People Engage in Instant Messaging Based Social Commerce, researchers on this project analyzed twelve users of Chinese Instant Messenger (IM) social commerce platforms to study how social recommendation engines on IM commerce platforms result in a different user experience. The study was entirely on Chinese platforms, mainly WeChat. The research was conducted by a team composed of members from Stanford, Beijing, Boston, and Kyoto. The interviewing process took place in the winter of 2020 and was an entirely qualitative analysis, using just interviews. The goal of the interviews were to probe about how participants got involved in IM based social commerce, their experience on IM based social commerce, the reasons for and against IM based social commerce, and changes introduced by IM based social commerce to their lives. An IM based service integrates directly with more intimate social experiences. Essentially, IM is real time texting over a network. This can be both a synchronous or asynchronous activity. IM based social commerce makes the user shopping experience more accessible. In terms of CSCW, this is an example of ubiquitous computing. This creates a “jump out of the box” experience as described in the research because the IM based platform facilitates a change in user behavior and the overall experience on social commerce. The benefit of this concept is that the app is leveraging personal relationships and real life networks that can actually lead to a more meaningful customer experience, which is founded upon trust.

A second CSCW paper, Embeddedness and Sequentiality in Social Media, explores a new methodology for analyzing social media—another expression of ubiquitous computing in CSCW. This paper used ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) as a framework to research Facebook users. In brief, ethnomethodology studies the everyday interactions of people and relates how this pertains to forming their outlook of the world. Conversational analysis delves into the structures of conversations so as to extract information about how people construct their experiences. The team behind this research, hailing from University of Nottingham and Stockholm University, recognized that “moment by moment, unfolding, real time human action” was somewhat missing from the CSCW literature on social media. The significance of this is they felt that by exploring EMCA, it could provide different insights on collaborative social network systems, as opposed to relying solely on recall. This problem arises when a group in a distributed collaborative system experiences a breakdown in communication due to the fact that its members lack a shared understanding for the given context they are working in. According to the article, it matters that everyone is in alignment over the nature of what they are doing.

The solutions of unresolved issues in ubiquitous computing systems can be explored now that the observations of user experiences in social media, which are normally based on recollection, are no longer needed. Some of the unresolved questions include: “How does social media start being used, stop being used? When is it being used, and how is that usage ordered and integrated into other, parallel activities at the time?” The research specifically focuses on cities or urban areas as they are places where one can expect a lot of technological and social activities to take place. An apparent guiding principle to the research is that the goal of advancing any ubicomp technologies should be to maximize the amount of good to as many people in a society as possible. A key observation is made about the way in which these infrastructures come into being:<blockquote>A ubiquitous computing infrastructure can play an important role in enabling and enhancing beneficial social processes as, unlike electricity, digital infrastructure enhances a society’s cognitive power by its ability to connect people and information [39]. While infrastructure projects in the past had the idealistic notion to connect the urban realm and its communities of different ethnicity, wealth, and beliefs, Graham et al. [28] note the increasing fragmentation of the management and ownership of infrastructures. Essentially, ubiquitous computing will reflect society and the choices it makes will influence those computing systems that are put in place. Ubiquitous computing is huge to the field of CSCW because as the barriers between physical boundaries that separate us break down with the adoption of technology, our relationships to those locations is actually strengthened. It is important to analyze ‘what we know we must support socially’ for a few reasons. The way interaction takes place within an in person setting is something that cannot be easily changed unlike the way technology is able to be manipulated to fit specific needs today. There are certain norms and standards lived up to within peoples’ day to day lives, a certain part of those norms and attitudes carry over into the online world. The problem is mimicking daily communication styles and behavior into an online setting. Schmidt examines this concept within “Mind the Gap”, he states “Cooperative work is a tricky phenomenon. We are all engaged in cooperative activities of various sorts in our everyday lives and routinely observe others working together around us. We are all experts from our everyday experience. And yet this quotidian insight can be utterly misleading when applied to the design of systems to support cooperative work”. Though in person communication on a day to day basis is natural for most, it does not easily translate over into cooperative work. This highlights the need for adaptability within CSCW systems, Schmidt expands on the “crucial requirement of flexibility that arises from the changing needs of the cooperative work setting”.

Groupware goes hand in hand with CSCW. The term refers to software that is designed to support activities of a group or organization over a network and includes email, conferencing tools, group calendars, workflow management tools, etc. While groupware enables geographically dispersed teams to achieve organizational goals and engage in cooperative work, there are also many challenges that accompany use of such systems. For instance, groupware often requires users to learn a new system, which users may perceive as creating more work for them without much benefit. If team members are not willing to learn and adopt groupware, it is highly difficult for the organization to develop the requisite critical mass for the groupware to be useful. Further, research has found that groupware requires careful implementation into a group setting, and product developers have not as yet been able to find the most optimal way to introduce such systems into organizational environments. Given this, many fields that utilize CSCW tools require carefully designed frameworks to account for different generations.

One of the recurring challenges in CSCW environments is development of an infrastructure that can bridge cross generational gaps in virtual teams. Many companies rely on communication and collaboration between intergenerational employees to be successful, and often this collaboration is performed using various software and technologies. These team driven groupware platforms range from email and daily calendars to version control platforms, task management software, and more. These tools must be accessible to workplace teams virtually, with remote work becoming more commonplace. Ideally, system designs will accommodate all team members, but orienting older workers to new CSCW tools can often be difficult. This can cause problems in virtual teams due to the necessity of incorporating the wealth of knowledge and expertise that older workers bring to the table with the technological challenges of new virtual environments. Orienting and retraining older workers to effectively utilize new technology can often be difficult, as they generally have less experience than younger workers with learning such new technologies. As older workers delay their retirement and re enter the workforce, teams are becoming increasingly intergenerational, meaning that the creation of effective intergenerational CSCW frameworks for virtual environments is essential.

Collaboration amongst peers has always been an integral aspect to getting something done. Working together not only eases the difficulty of the task at hand, but leads to more effective work that is accomplished. As computers and technology become increasingly important in everyday lives, communication skills change as technology allows individuals to stay connected across many previous barriers. Barriers to communication might have been the end of the work day, being across the country or even slow applications that are more of a hindrance than an aid. With new collaborative tools that have been tried and tested, these previous barriers to communication have been shattered and replaced with new tools that help progress collaboration. Tools that have been integral in shaping computer supported cooperative work can be split into two major categories: communication and organization. Communication: The ability to communicate with others while working is a luxury that has increased the speed and accuracy at which tasks are accomplished. Individuals can also send pictures of code and issues through platforms like Microsoft Teams without anyone needing to change screen monitors. This particular change increased office productivity and communication by almost half. Such apps usually tie into different electronic devices such as computers and tablets, therefore people receive reminders across multiple platforms. If the platform permits, individuals in teams can set reminders for other people. They may be caused by failures to coordinate activities across multiple departments, a form of articulation work.

CSCW researchers often have difficulty deciding which set(s) of tools will benefit a particular group because of the nuances within organizations. This is exacerbated by the fact that it is challenging to accurately identify user/group/organization needs and requirements, since such needs and requirements inevitably change through the introduction of the system itself. When researchers study requirements multiple times, the requirements themselves often change and evolve once the researchers have completed a particular iteration.

The dynamic of women in the workforce not participating as much is less of a CSCW problem and is prevalent in all workspaces, but software can still be designed to increase female participation in CSCW. In software design, women are more likely to be involved if software is designed to center communication and cooperation. This is one possible method to increasing female participation, and it does not address why CSCW has lower female participation in the first place. In a study, women generally rated themselves as being poor at understanding technology, having difficulty at using mobile programs, and disliked using CSCW software. However, when asked these same questions about specific software in general, they rated themselves just as strongly as the men in the study did. This lack of confidence in software as a whole impacts women’s ability to efficiently and effectively use online programs compared to men, and accounts for some of the difficulties women face in using CSCW software. many developers often do not take gender differences into account when designing their CSCW systems. The conference is currently held in October or November and features research in the design and use of technologies that affect organizational and group work. With the rapidly increasing development of new devices that allow collaboration from different locations and contexts, CSCW seeks to bring together researchers from across academia and industry to discuss the many facets of virtual collaboration from both social and technical perspectives. Internationally, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) sponsors the International Conference on Computer Supported Work in Design, which takes place yearly. In addition, the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies sponsors the European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, which has been held every two years since 1989. CSCW panels are a regular component of conferences of the adjacent field of Science and Technology Studies.