From TBECKMAN@cup.portal.com (Tom J Beckman) Newsgroups: comp.groupware Subject: Macintosh Multi-User Task Management Software? Message-ID: <72784@cup.portal.com> Date: Sat, 2 Jan 93 09:03:27 PST Organization: The Portal System (TM) Distribution: world Lines: 11 I'm looking for multi-user task management software that will run on Macintosh computers and over a LocalTalk network. I want to be able to have project templates that consist of a number of tasks that can be modified and added to the main database of tasks. I've looked at Syzygy, a commercial program, which is similar to what I want. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Tom Beckman TBECKMAN@cup.portal.com tel. (408)-338-8700 fax. (408)-338-9861 From sss@world.std.com (Sergiu S Simmel) Subject: Info on Kala now available via anonymous FTP Message-ID: Sender: sss@world.std.com (Sergiu S Simmel) Organization: Penobscot Development Corporation, Arlington MA Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1993 22:51:54 GMT Lines: 205 ========================================================================== Penobscot Development Corporation Announces Availability of Kala documents and Kala Forum back issues via ftp for public use. Kala is a Persistent Data Server commercially available from PDC. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- All materials are Copyrighted by Penobscot Development Corporation. Their use is restricted to inspection and internal distribution only. ========================================================================== Kala Forum digests (back issues) and other miscellaneous Kala documents are now available through ftp from ============= world.std.com ============= To connect to this ftp site, type the following at your Unix shell prompt: % ftp world.std.com or consult with your system administrator if you use any other means for accessing the network (such as BBSs, CompuServe, etc.). If coming through a regular Unix connection, you should see something similar to the following: Connected to world.std.com 220 world FTP server (Version 6.12 Sat Nov 7 22:18:34 EST 1992) ready. Name (world.std.com:your_name): anonymous You must enter 'anonymous' at the Name: prompt. In response, you will see the following: 331 Guest login ok, send e-mail address as password. Password: Next, to be on the safe side, type at the ftp> prompt: ftp> bin On the world.std.com computer, the publicly accessible Kala documents are located in the pub/kala directory. Change your current working directory to it using: ftp> cd pub/kala The Kala public materials are organized into the following few subdirectories: pub/kala /KalaForum -- contains all back issues of the Kala Forum digests /Articles -- contains preliminary versions of articles published elsewhere /ShortDocuments -- contains various technical and business documents about Kala To get at any of these directories, just type 'cd directory-name' at the ftp> prompt. To list the files in the directory you're in, just type 'ls' at the ftp> prompt. To download any of the files, type: ftp> get filename To exit ftp, type 'quit' at the ftp> prompt. All Kala Forum issues are in ASCII text only. Other documents have names ending in '.txt' to indicated that they are in ASCII text format or '.ps' for PostScript format (other formats later). Please let us know if you have any problems. Enjoy! ============================================================================== The Kala Archive Table of Contents ============================================================================== .txt = formatted ASCII text file; .ps = PostScript file; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ~ftp/pub/kala -- the root of the Kala Archive ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ .../Articles -- electronic versions of articles on Kala published in other paper-based publications /Byte9212.txt -- "Objects of Substance", BYTE, Volume 17, Number 14, pp.130-133, December 1992. /Hoot9208.txt -- "ODBMS -- Providing Commonalty While Supporting Diversity", Hotline on Object Oriented Technology, Volume 3, Number 10, pp.14-17, August 1992. /Hoot9302.txt -- "Kala Licensing & Metering -- Infrastructure for a New Economics of Software", Volume 4, Number 5, February 1993. /OOPSLA92.ps -- "The Kala Basket", Proceedings of OOPSLA'91, pp.230-246, October 1991. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ .../KalaForum -- the archive of the Kala Forum -- the infor- mation exchange service on Kala and persis- tent data servers (see separate TOC in that directory) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ .../TechDocs -- short documents on various Kala technical topics /AppNote01-SimpleTransactions.txt -- AppNote showing how you can implement a simple trans- action model in less than 1 page of Kala code. /HowTo01-CreateMonads.txt -- A memorandum explaining how to create layout functions around your applications data for packaging in Kala monads. /InDepth01-ModelIndependence.txt -- Brief discussion on Kala's independence of any specific data or object models. /InDepth02-Transactions.txt -- Brief discussion on Kala's support for arbitrary transactions models. /InDepth03-NestedTactions.txt -- Brief discussion on Kala's natural support for nesting transactions /InDepth04-Recoverability.txt -- Brief discussion on Kala's ability to recover from any crash, save media failure. /InDepth05-Performance.txt -- Brief discussion on Kala's performance-oriented imple- mentation and results. /InDepth06-Security.txt -- Brief discussion on Kala's secure implementation and support for security models. /InDepth07-SharedData.txt -- Brief discussion on Kala's support for sharing of data. /InDepth08-Licensing.txt -- Brief discussion on Kala's support for arbitrary licen- sing (pay-per-copy) and metering (pay-per-use) models. /InDepth09-SchemaEvolution.txt -- Brief discussions on the re- lationship between Kala and the problem of schema evolu- tion in databases. /OMG_OS_RFI_response.txt -- A Response to OMG's Request for Information on Object Services. /TechBrief.txt -- A 2-page Technical Brief of Kala. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ .../BsnsDocs -- documents describing various business related aspects around the Kala product: /Echo05-Shinji.txt -- A reference letter from Dr. Shinji Suzuki of University of Tokyo. /Echo06-Meyer.txt -- A reference letter from Thomas Meyer of EDS. /PricingSun.txt -- Pricing and Ordering info for SPARCstation/SunOS. /PricingDos.txt -- Pricing and Ordering info for i80x86/MS-DOS. /PricingNRE.txt -- PDC's NRE and Consulting rates and terms. /ResearchProgramme.txt -- Discounts and Terms for Research institutions. ============================================================================== _ _ ____ _ ____ tm ____________________________________ \\ / | \ \ | \ \\\\ \\ /__ \ __ \ \ \ __ \ \\\\ \\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \\\\ \\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \\\\ No more than you need !!! \\' \' \' \' '----' \' \' \\\\ No less than you want !!! ........................................................................ Penobscot Development Corp. 50 Princeton Road Arlington Mass. 02174-8253 voice: +1-617-646-3951 fax: +1-617-646-5753 email: kala@world.std.com From freytag@seas.gwu.edu (Richard Freytag) Subject: Looking for <12min, genrl groupware video! Message-ID: <1993Jan7.120957.13679@seas.gwu.edu> Followup-To: freytag@seas.gwu.edu Summary: How to make the gware case to non-technicians Keywords: video, marketing, groupware, demonstration Sender: Richard Freytag Organization: George Washington University Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 12:09:57 GMT Lines: 18 I need an attractive, attention holding video to explain to a bunch of non-technicians who will make the decision what the advantages of groupware can be over the traditional way of doing things. The video should not mention any product by name (well not much, anyway), except as an example. The advantages such as discussion facilitation through anonymity and non-physically colocated meetings should be highlighted. These will be the sort of surprising (surprising to my target audience that is), features of groupware that I'm hoping a flashy video will convey effectively. Buttress this with viewgraphs and I hope to have a good pitch. Any help would be much appreciated. I realize this is a tall order; but the net has never failed me yet! -Richard Freytag From Tom Brinck Subject: looking for shared windowing systems Message-ID: <1993Jan7.232415.26740@walter.bellcore.com> Sender: news@walter.bellcore.com Nntp-Posting-Host: bambam.bellcore.com Organization: Bellcore Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 23:24:15 GMT Lines: 14 I'm looking for a list of shared windowing systems. Any leads are welcome. In particular, I'm hoping to find robust software for shared X Windows that runs on Suns. Tom ---------------------------------------------- Tom Brinck Bellcore (201) 829-5238 hammer@bellcore.com From fay@archsci.arch.su.oz.au () Subject: AAAI-93 WORKSHOP ON AI IN COLLABORATIVE DESIGN Message-ID: <1993Jan8.064746.28290@ucc.su.OZ.AU> Sender: news@ucc.su.OZ.AU Nntp-Posting-Host: archsci.arch.su.edu.au Reply-To: fay@archsci.arch.su.oz.au () Organization: Dept of Architectural & Design Science, University of Sydney, Australia Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 06:47:46 GMT Lines: 171 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PARTICIPATION THE AAAI-93 WORKSHOP ON AI IN COLLABORATIVE DESIGN in conjunction with AAAI-93, Washington DC, 11-16 July 1993 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Design is recognised as being among the most complex of the intelligent human endeavors. AI in design has helped to develop renewed interest in design research and design computing by providing a symbolic approach to modeling complex recognition and decision making. Until recently, most AI in design research considered design as an activity carried out by a single person and provided support tools for the individual. Design, today, is rarely carried out by an individual working alone, but by individuals or groups working collaboratively. AI addresses models of problem solving for both individual and multi-agent activities, and consequently has the potential to shape this developing field. This workshop is of particular interest at this time because there is an increasing focus on the use of AI in design environments but a lack of comprehensive models for collaborative design. AI provides representation and reasoning paradigms which have extended the use of computers in design beyond graphical CAD and numerical analysis towards knowledge-based systems. Current developments in collaborative design focus on communication among individuals or processes across multiple domains, where collaboration can occur among homogeneous or heterogeneuos design views. Where AI-based design process models address an individual's multiple views, AI-based collaborative design must focus on merging and communication multiple views across multiple individuals. The organisers of this workshop provide two distinct perspectives on the topic of AI in collaborative design. One perspective is to view it as an AI problem, the other is to view it as a design problem. This workshop will bring together AI researchers and professionals interested in design problem solving and design researchers and professionals who use AI techniques. Objectives ---------- The main objectives of this workshop are to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in the field of artificial intelligence in collaborative design, to discuss state-of-the-art experimental research, and to set a new agenda for future research and development in the field. Topics ------ The workshop will focus on the following issues: * DAI in collaborative design * languages for communication and cooperation * representation and communication of design intent * intelligent user interfaces for groupwork * intelligent synchronous multimedia interaction * models for developing groupware * symbolic approaches to visual reasoning * recognition of emergence of new properties Format of the Workshop ---------------------- The workshop is designed to have a round-table format. Up to four presentations selected from the submitted papers will be given. The presentations will act as catalysts for discussion. Attendance ---------- Attendance at the workshop will be restricted to people who submit papers. The number of attendees will be limited. Submission Details ------------------ Four copies of either full papers (maximum 20 pages) or extended abstracts (approximately 5 pages) should be sent either electronically or as hard copy to: Fay Sudweeks Workshop Manager Department of Architectural and Design Science University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Fax: +61-2-692 3031 Phone: +61-2-692 2328 Email: fay@chomsky.arch.su.edu.au Timetable --------- Notification of intention to participate As soon as possible Full papers or extended abstracts due March 12, 1993 Notification of acceptance April 2, 1993 Revised, camera-ready copy due April 30, 1993 Workshop Chairs --------------- John S. Gero Design Computing Unit University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Fax: +61-2-692 3031 Phone: +61-2-692 2328 Email: john@archsci.arch.su.edu.au Mary Lou Maher Design Computing Unit University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Fax: +61-2-692 3031 Phone: +61-2-692 4108 Email: mary@archsci.arch.su.edu.au Workshop Committee ------------------ Mark Fox University of Toronto msf@ie.utoronto.ca Barbara Hayes-Roth Stanford University bhr@hpp.stanford.edu D. Sriram Massachusetts Institute of Technology sriram@athena.mit.edu ######################################################################## NOTIFICATION FORM -- AAAI-93 Workshop on AI in Collaborative Design [Please return as soon as possible.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I INTEND TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS WORKSHOP. Proposed title of my paper/abstract:____________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Title (Prof/Dr/Mr/Ms):___________ Given name:______________________ Family Name:__________________________ Address:________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Email:__________________________________________________________________ Fax:___________________________________ Phone:__________________________ Please return to: FAY SUDWEEKS Conference Manager, AAAI-93 Workshop on AI in Collaborative Design Department of Architectural and Design Science University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Email: fay@archsci.arch.su.edu.au Fax: +61-2-692-3031 Phone: +61-2-692-2328 ######################################################################## -------------- Fay Sudweeks ----- Department of Architectural and Design Science University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia ----- Tel (61) (2) 692 2328 Fax (61) (2) 692 3031 -------- Internet: fay@chomsky.arch.su.edu.au From kling@ics.uci.edu (Rob Kling) Subject: Review of book about email: Connections Message-ID: <9301080841.ab23283@q2.ics.uci.edu> Newsgroups: comp.groupware,comp.infosystems Lines: 302 Date: 8 Jan 93 16:41:20 GMT Review of Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler. MIT Press, 1991 Reviewed by Rob Kling[*,**] and Lisa Covi[*] Department of Information and Computer Science* and Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations** University of California, Irvine. Irvine, Ca 92717 Draft 4 -- January 1993 To appear: The Information Society, 9(1) (Jan-Feb 1993). ========================================= Electronic mail (email) use is one of the important emergent phenomena of computerization. Email capabilities have often been treated as minor additions to computer systems with more social roles. Yet many professional and managers have found them to be the most important capabilities of their computer systems (Bullen and Bennett, 1991, Ladner, 1992). There is a small body of systematic research about the ways that email use can alter social relations. But it has been relatively unknown to many professionals and managers who have significant interests in or responsibilities for these technologies. A book like Connections is long overdue. Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, along with Tora Bikson, Roxanne Hiltz, Robert Kraut, Lynne Markus, and Ron Rice are among the pioneers who have been studying how social behavior is altered when people and organizations depend upon electronic media for business communication. Connections examines how the use of email and computer conferencing within organizations alters social relationships. The book is usefully modest in scope, and is aimed primarily at a professional audience. Sproull and Kiesler focus on behavior inside organizations rather than upon the numerous forms of electronic media, including public access systems such as Compuserve, community bulletin boards, or the Internet. Even so, readers who are interested in social behavior on these public access networks can find new insights in Connections. Sproull and Kiesler provide a sophisticated understanding of how managing people using email differs from managers' often vague expectations of "increased productivity." They argue that email doesn't just substitute one communication means for another, but has far more significant social effects. Email increases people's connections within and outside their organizations. It transforms the social relationships between people who connect electronically rather than just face to face not only by increasing the ease and frequency of interaction, but also democratizing group discussion. The window into a highly-connected environment this book provides is important for people less well-versed in the technology to help avoid common embarrassment such as sending "private" messages that may be printed on public printers by any recipient, inadvertently responding to all members of a list instead of to the sender, and adopting inappropriate personas in public forums. The book's ethnographic content is unique among email texts. The first two chapters are devoted to describing how email creates an immediate "first-level effect" of increasing efficiency by reducing the costs of sharing information, and accelerating and regularizing information flow. The real news in their argument is contained in their description of "second-level effects" in which electronic communication alters attention, contact, interdependence, roles and information exchange. The authors support their theses through engaging examples of group coordination and behavior cues in real copies of email and systematic studies. During the last 10 years, they have developed an important program of empirical research on the ways that groups use electronic media, and the consequences of this use. They organize their research by building on a 40 year tradition of experimental work on small group behavior carried out by social psychologists. The results of Sproull, Kiesler and their colleagues extends that tradition to give useful insights into these newer forms of electronic group work. For example, small group researchers have found that groups are much more likely to make riskier decisions than the individual members would have if they acted alone. Sproull and Kiesler's experiments build on this theme to examine whether groups which communicate over electronic media make decisions that are more conservative or riskier than groups in face-to-face meetings. Kiesler and Sproull marshal interesting evidence to show that electronic groups often behave differently than face-to-face groups, even when they work on similar tasks. Electronic groups are less dominated by the amount of talk generated by the higher status participants. But participants get less ongoing feedback in body language, and consequently, they engage in less conventional behavior. Participants are sometimes much less polite with each other, and take much more extreme positions. The authors report that small electronic groups can take from 4-10 times as long as face-to-face groups to develop a consensus. The decisions were often riskier, but participants trusted them as much as they did the more conventional decisions made in face-to- face groups. A key element is Sproull and Kiesler's argument that electronic media "lack" the social cues which regulate interpersonal behavior. When people communicate with electronic media, they have more trouble imagining what others are feeling because they don't see nods or grimaces, or hear murmurs of approval or grunts of dismay in the middle of their sentences. Further, they argue that electronic communicants do not see symbols of the social status of a meetings' participants, and consequently are less constrained by them. We find this argument interesting, but not completely convincing. Blank paper provides no more social cues than do computer screens. But people often embellish paper and screens with clues about their status and orientations. In addition, experienced email users often embellish their messages with some crude signifiers of emotions (sigh, grin). Further, as a discussion continues, people learn about other's perceptions. Also, one of the reasons electronic meeting may take longer than face to face meetings is because many people can talk faster than they can type. It is more accurate to say that people who communicate with text-based email or paper are likely to have fewer social cues about each other's social position and reactions than do people who communicate face-to-face. Kiesler and Sproull do a superb job of helping us understand the way that reduced social cues alter the behavior of groups and their decisions. (The reader who is interested in more recent research on this theme should see Lynne Markus' article.) The exploration of cues can prove useful in educating people who find that the traditional cues of their position are absent in their email interaction. Novices or people who only occasionally use email can use "Connections" to avoid the pitfalls of creating negative cues through Sproull and Kiesler's observations in chapter 5. For example, by illustrating the ephemerality of the medium, the authors induce people who are concerned about their status to be more conscious of the way the message "looks" and how its image is entwined with what it is trying to say. This is particularly important for those who have assistants handle their correspondence. In modern organizations, people use many means to communicate, including face-to-face, memos, telephone, and email. Each of these offers different possibilities for developing a position, learning how others feel, and obtaining other cues. Often, participants who have on-going relationships will use two or more of these media. Kiesler and Sproull open the question about how groups that use many or all of these media behave in contrast with those that rely only upon the convention non-digital media. They propose four principles to create an optimal environment for a networked organization: view people as people instead of users, provide open access to people and information, offer diverse forums for people to interact, and promote information exchange through policies and incentives. Connections outlines key policy and infrastructure choices in a way that can be understood by both systems managers and upper managers. Connections pulses with a lyrical enthusiasm for new communication technologies while periodically pausing to give readers helpful cautionary insights. Sproull and Kiesler are generally promoters of electronic communication. Their enthusiasm guides their emphasis upon some topics at the expense of others. For example, while they emphasize the ways that electronic media facilitate new social contacts, they lightly touch on the ways that professionals and managers in organizations which depend heavily upon email can collect 30 or more messages a day, and spend hours responding to those that do require responses or attention. Further, a professional or manager in such an organization can return from a 7 day trip to find an enticing platter of 300 messages filling his electronic mailbox. It is worth mentioning a few key gaps in the book. First, Connections doesn't pay much attention to the issues of information overload, privacy, misinformation, system breakdowns, the distribution of competencies, and technical risks, even though some of these are mentioned. This is a pathbreaking book that shows how the use of email can be studied empirically and conceptualized. But there is much important work for followon studies. These missing topics can be of considerable consequence in organizational life. For example, organizations may use mail systems very differently when either mail systems are common and seamless or mail systems vary from one division to another, and many messages are lost, delayed or garbled when crossing the mail system boundaries. The book also ignores some possibly important elements of system designs. For example, chapters 1, 5, and 7 examine communication via distribution lists. However, the authors don't mention that distribution lists can load one's mailbox with numerous relatively unimportant messages. There are alternative communication architectures, such as bulletin boards, which don't automatically add messages to one's in-box. But they require efforts to access, and messages can disappear from the centrally stored bulletin board before very casual readers scan them. This architectural difference, with resulting differences in style of information management, probably plays a key role in how many electronic groups one can participate in, either seriously or very casually. Similarly, Connections doesn't examine issues of long term information management with electronic communication. When key communications are in electronic form, people often try to archive them, and can build collections of hundreds or thousands of message files. Unfortunately, many of today's email systems don't provide good tools for managing such archives. It should not surprise us that organizations that adopt electronic systems with high quality archiving and search capabilities may behave differently than those in which managing electronic communication is a timeconsuming nuisance. Last, Connections focusses on the groups that use email for meetings and other work. In many organizations, only a fraction of people use email routinely. Email connects some people much more effectively than others, and can reshape the communication infrastructure of social systems. When and how do people's more and less active participation in email use alter the way that whole organizations behave? For some organizational members, routine email use by others disconnects them from significant aspects of organizational life. This is an important topic that would require a different form of study. It again indicates a kind of topic which reading this book inspired us to consider more carefully. As a collection, the topics listed above are less amenable to the kinds of experimental studies which form the evidentiary core of Connections. But they illustrate the range of issues which can shape the way that organizational participants use email systems, and consequently, the way that organizational practices hinge of key details of systems in use, not just generic system features. For example, the default editor for the mail system used by a major US bank is a crude line-editor. The clumsiness of the editor discourages people from sending messages more than a few lines in length. Message length could be influenced by other considerations, since many people want to send and receive only short messages. And there can be costs for people who have to read numerous long messages. But in this case, it seems that the limitations of a specific mail system, rather than overwork or collective preferences for short messages favors electronic communication via brief notes. And brief notes favor some "connections" more than others. Brief notes may also be cryptic and thus foster miscommunication. Bullen and Bennett (1991) reported that participants in their study almost universaly valued email, even when the systems were clumsy. But followon research could examine whether certain kinds of system constraints alter the forms of commuication and the resulting social value of email. These gaps indicate how Connections opens up possibilities for a rich array of systematic empirical research about the way that email systems influence organizational behavior. But the professional reader will find a sufficient number of cues and clues about these matters to find the book to be an invaluable resource now. The book is especially important to help bring the dynamics of electronic group communication to the attention of practicing managers. Most managers that we know who are interested in email are preoccupied with basic and important operational questions about access patterns, gateways, pricing, system maintenance, security practices and archiving. They haven't yet given much attention to how their human organizations may change after they get the mail to flow smoothly, and everyone to depend upon it for numerous routine communications. Scholars who wish to follow up these topics will find rich ideas and data in Connections. The bibliography is also superb for a professional book. But it is a bit too selective for scholars who want to delve more deeply into electronic communication in organizations. Key citations to important studies of electronic communication media use by other prolific scholars are missing from the references. Connections concludes with a chapter to help managers start up computer networks inside their own organizations. But Connections is not a simple technologically utopian tract. Sproull and Kiesler's analyses make practical recommendations on strengths nd pitfalls of the electronic communication in various circumstances. Connections is a pioneering book that every manager or professional who is interested in the use of electronic communication must read. And it's a provocative book for scholars as well. The new and inexpensive paperback edition makes the book easily accessible to virtually anyone with a serious interest in email and organizational life. References Bullen, Christine and John Bennett. 1991. Groupware in Practice: An Interpretation of Work Experience" in Dunlop, Charles and and Rob Kling (Ed). 1991. Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices. Boston: Academic Press. Ladner, Sharyn and Hope Tillman. 1992. "How Special Librarians Really Use the Internet: Summary of Findings and Implications for the Library of the Future" Canadian Library Journal, 49(3), 211-216. Markus, Lynne "Electronic Mail as a Medium of Managerial Choice" (Organizational Science (forthcoming). From sam@esl.com (Samuel Hahn) Newsgroups: comp.groupware Subject: Re: looking for shared windowing systems Message-ID: <1910@esl.ESL.COM> Date: 11 Jan 93 19:05:02 GMT References: <1993Jan7.232415.26740@walter.bellcore.com> Sender: news@esl.ESL.COM Reply-To: Samuel Hahn Lines: 15 Nntp-Posting-Host: avalon In article <1993Jan7.232415.26740@walter.bellcore.com> hammer@thumper.bellcore.com (Tom Brinck) writes: > > I'm looking for a list of shared windowing systems. Any leads are welcome. > > In particular, I'm hoping to find robust software for shared X Windows > that runs on Suns. > > Tom Tom -- I believe (though I haven't ever used it) that HP has something called Shared-X. I don't know if it runs on just any X environment. Try them; let me know if you like it. -- Samuel Hahn From John W Gintell Subject: Re: GroupKit? Organization: Bull - US Applied Research Lab Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 00:19:16 GMT Message-ID: <1993Jan12.001916.19980@mips2.ma30.bull.com> X-Useragent: Nuntius v1.1.1d12 References: <1993Jan8.172421.15436@utagraph.uta.edu> Sender: news@mips2.ma30.bull.com (Usenet News Manager) X-Xxdate: Mon, 11 Jan 93 19:21:24 GMT Lines: 15 Subject: GroupKit? From: Bob Weems, weems@cse.uta.edu Date: 8 Jan 93 17:24:21 GMT In article <1993Jan8.172421.15436@utagraph.uta.edu> Bob Weems, weems@cse.uta.edu writes: >Does anyone recall a posting around Oct/Nov 1992 regarding a groupware >toolkit based on InterViews? I believe that it was developed >at Univ. of Toronto. I have lost my paper copies and cannot >recall the ftp site. Try University of Calgary GroupKit was described at CSCW 92 send email to roseman@cpsc.calgary.ca for more information From richard@technology.com (Richard Murphy) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 05:25:22 GMT References: <1993Jan7.232415.26740@walter.bellcore.com> <1910@esl.ESL.COM> Organization: Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas Lines: 15 In article <1910@esl.ESL.COM> Samuel Hahn writes: >In article <1993Jan7.232415.26740@walter.bellcore.com> >hammer@thumper.bellcore.com (Tom Brinck) writes: >> >> I'm looking for a list of shared windowing systems. Any leads are welcome. >> >> In particular, I'm hoping to find robust software for shared X Windows >> that runs on Suns. >> >> Tom It may not be what you need, but the XMX X-window multiplexor software from Brown University allows you to share the output of your windows. Input is from one window only. R. Murphy From lacroix@heron.bellcore.com (Michel Lacroix) Subject: groupware tools in sw development Message-ID: <1993Jan12.171510.14560@walter.bellcore.com> Sender: lacroix@heron (Michel Lacroix) Nntp-Posting-Host: heron.bellcore.com Organization: Morristown Research and Engineering Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 17:15:10 GMT Lines: 13 Is there anyone having some experience with using groupware tools in software development projects? In a former life, I used the Notesfile system, for design discussions (although the final decisions were taken in a meeting), keeping track of open issues, and displaying the current project plan with the status of the different tasks. I would be particularly interested in hearing about experiences with more recent commercial tools or even experimental ones. Michel Lacroix From allison@hal.COM (Dennis Allison) Newsgroups: comp.groupware Subject: Call for Papers -- GroupWare '93 USA Message-ID: <1ivpgnINN205@sumeru.hal.com> Date: 13 Jan 93 00:59:03 GMT Organization: HaL Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 47 NNTP-Posting-Host: sumeru.hal.com GROUPWARE '93 Conference Announcement and Call for Papers GroupWare '92 featured over 130 speakers and 55 exhibitors representing almost 200 groupware solutions. The demand for infomration on groupware and workgroup solutions is growing as groupware becomes more commercial. GroupWare '93 is an industry event positioned to help meet that demand. Groupware '93 will be held on August 9-13, 1993 at the San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, CA. The conference will feature a full day of 16 tutorials by consultants, analysts, and industry experts. A wide variety of general sessions, 3-4 topic-oriented tracks, computer-mediated discussions and workshoips will comprise the 60 sessions of this second annual conference. To be considered for time for a presentation,, tutorial, workshop, por electronic discussion at GroupWare '93, a 100 word abstract and 50-word biography must be submitted to the address below by January 15, 1993. Abstracts may be submitted by mail, FAX or electronic mail; to be considered you must include full contact information (Name, title, phone, fax, address, and alternate contacts). Suggested Topic for GroupWare 93: . User groupware experiences . Internationalizing groupware . Groupware in the enterprise . E-mail Standards . Groupware adoption Issues . Groupware licensing and distribution . Groupware development environments . Automated scheduling . Groupware applications frameworks . SGML and groupware . Database foundations for groupware . Workflow products and issues . Cooperative documents and spreadsheets . Groupware market trends . Security and Groupware . Groupware options for decision support . Groupware and multimedia . Groupware in document and image management . Topics for electronic meeting room discussions . Vendor collaboration in the groupware environment of the 1990's All speakers selected by the program committee and participating in the conference will have the $795 conference fee waived. All abstracts and proposal should be sent to David Coleman, Conference Chairman GroupWare '93 1470 DeHaro Street San Francisco, CA 94107 Fax (415) 550-8556 MCI Mail 402-6507 Internet davidc121@aol.com For information on exhibiting or conference logistics contact The Conference Group, (800) 247-0262 or (602) 661-1260. From allison@hal.COM (Dennis Allison) Newsgroups: comp.groupware Subject: Call for Papers -- GroupWare '93 Europe Message-ID: <1ivpdiINN1uf@sumeru.hal.com> Date: 13 Jan 93 00:57:21 GMT Organization: HaL Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 49 NNTP-Posting-Host: sumeru.hal.com GROUPWARE '93 Europe Conference Announcement and Call for Papers GroupWare '92 featured over 130 speakers and 55 exhibitors representing almost 200 groupware solutions. The demand for infomration on groupware and workgroup solutions is growing as groupware becomes more commercial. GroupWare '93 Europe is an executive conference focused on commercial groupware solutions for the enterprise, benefits, pitfalls, and options. This event will be held in three cities in Europe in the first two weeks of May (Stockholm May 5-6, London May 10-11, Frankfurt May 13-14). Each two-day conference will feature general sessions, break-out sessions and team-oriented laboratories for hands-on business case studies using groupware products. To be considered for time for a presentation at GroupWare '93 Europe, a 100-word abstract and 50-word biography must be submitted to the address listed below by January 15, 1993. Abstracts may be submitted by mail, FAX, or electronic mail; you must include full contact information (name, title, phone, fax, address abd alternate contacts) to be considered. Suggested Topic for GroupWare 93: . User groupware experiences . Internationalizing groupware . Groupware in the enterprise . E-mail Standards . Groupware adoption Issues . Groupware licensing and distribution . Groupware development environments . Automated scheduling . Groupware applications frameworks . SGML and groupware . Database foundations for groupware . Workflow products and issues . Cooperative documents and spreadsheets . Groupware market trends . Security and Groupware . Groupware options for decision support . Groupware and multimedia . Groupware in document and image management . Topics for electronic meeting room discussions . Vendor collaboration in the groupware environment of the 1990's All speakers selected by the program committee and participating in the conference will have the conference fee waived. All abstracts and proposal should be sent to David Coleman, Conference Chairman GroupWare '93 1470 DeHaro Street San Francisco, CA 94107 Fax (415) 550-8556 MCI Mail 402-6507 Internet davidc121@aol.com For information on exhibiting or conference logistics contact The Conference Group, (602) 661-1260. From david@ruc.dk (David Stodolsky) Newsgroups: comp.groupware,news.answers Subject: Introduction to comp.groupware (Periodic informational Posting) Supersedes: Followup-To: comp.groupware Date: 13 Jan 1993 06:02:24 GMT Organization: Roskilde University Lines: 321 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Distribution: world Expires: 10 Feb 1993 06:02:16 GMT Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: pit-manager.mit.edu Summary: Guidelines for posting to the Usenet newsgroup comp.groupware. Keywords: CSCW, orgware, group, interactive, shared, environments X-Last-Updated: 1992/10/06 Archive-name: groupware-intro Last-modified: 1992/10/6 Version: 1.2 Please read carefully: Any article posted to comp.groupware uses a minimum of ten hours of readers' time. Do not post test messages to comp.groupware (see section 5 below). This article is posted automatically every 14 days to introduce the group to the more than one thousand new readers that have subscribed during that period. ---------------- Contents (and revision information) ------------ Sections in this article (Revised in last modification) 0. Groupware is software and hardware for shared interactive environments. (Revised ordering of paragraphs) 1. Set your distribution to "world". 2. Sign your article. 3. Comp.groupware is being archived. (Revised) 4. If you are posting copyrighted work... 5. Authors should refer to "Guidelines for posting on Usenet"... (Revised) 6. When you reply to a message, do not change the subject line... 7. Comp.groupware is read by over 47,000 people. ------------ End of Contents (and revision information) ---------- 0. Groupware is software and hardware for shared interactive environments. The term "environment" includes software and hardware that sets the context for interaction. Hardware can include specially designed furnishings and architectural spaces that are considered integral to correct utilization of a given software application. A groupware application may require a specific organizational environment to function as expected. More powerful applications can adapt to, or overcome limitations of, their environments. The term "interactive" is used to indicate that time constraints are managed by the system. Many groupware applications appear to support real-time interaction. Others merely enforce deadlines that can span weeks. In either case, the technical limitations on the pace of interaction are made (to appear) negligible in terms of the objectives of the application. Systems that exclude reference to real time are not groupware applications. The term "shared" indicates that two or more participants interact with one another in such a manner that each person influences and is influenced by each other person. No upper limit in the number of participants is indicated, because mediated groups, as opposed to natural ones, can maintain joint awareness with very large numbers of persons. (Joint awareness is one way that "group" is defined.) An objective of some groupware applications is to increase the number of persons that can interact "as a group". Some definitions of groupware include the notion of a common goal. While all systems require some agreement among participants (at minimum that they should be jointly used), interactions can be predominately conflictual. Management of conflict is often a crucial feature of a groupware system. Vote collecting systems are an example. Definitions: Group - Two or more persons who are interacting with one another in such a manner that each person influences and is influenced by each other person (Shaw, M. E. _Group dynamics: The psychology of small group behaviour_. 1976, p. 11). Ware - 1 a) manufactured articles, products of art or craft.... b) an article of merchandise.... 3) an intangible item (as a service) that is a marketable commodity. (_Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary_, 1976, p. 1319). 1. Set your distribution to "world". Comp.groupware is delivered to all continents. Do not limit your chances for feedback by restricting distribution. Restricted distribution can cause confusion when people read responses to articles they have not seen. If you notice an article has a restricted distribution, inform the poster by mail. If you are restricted from posting to "world" by your administrator, request a change in your privileges, at least for this newsgroup. If refused, determine what your rights are in terms of appeal, based upon information available at your site. An alternative is to use the Net to find information and persons to contact concerning your rights. Try the newsgroups: comp.org.eff.news comp.org.eff.talk misc.legal.computing alt.society.civil-liberty alt.comp.acad-freedom.news alt.society.cu-digest A frequently asked questions file can be retrieved by sending email to: archive-server@eff.org, include the line "send caf-faq netnews.writing". Information about the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) can be requested from eff@eff.org. You can also retrieve information about EFF and its projects via anonymous FTP from ftp.eff.org. As a final resort, send a summary of your case to: Carl Kadie (kadie@eff.org) Electronic Frontier Foundation 155 Second Street Cambridge, MA 02141, USA Tel.: +1 (617) 864-0665 Fax: +1 (617) 864-0866. If you can send email off-site, you can post using a Usenet-news mail server. Email to "comp-groupware@ucbvax.berkeley.edu" is posted with the subject line of your letter becoming the subject line of the article. (Note: "." in the newsgroup name is written as "-".) This allows you to post to a newsgroup even if you have read-only access to Network News. 2. Sign your article. Each name should have one and only one user. If the article is a joint product, indicate this at the beginning and end of the article. Some news reading programs allow certain names to be to be automatically selected. Help the reader by using the same name at all times. This will improve the chances that people will read your articles. The signature should include complete name, address, and telephone number (this allows quick verification in case forgery is suspected). E-mail addresses ought to be included in the signature in case headers get munged. Another nice feature is geographical coordinates, so the time zone can be determined (useful in telephoning). The signature should be limited to four lines as is suggested practice on Usenet. 3. Comp.groupware is being archived. Selected discussions will be reprinted in the _Writings on Computer Science_ (_Datalogiske Skrifter_) working paper series available from the Institute of Geography, Socio-economic Analysis, and Computer Science, Roskilde University, Post Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark (ISSN 0109-9779-xx). Material appearing in the series can be published elsewhere. Authors will not be contacted individually before publication, but the draft will be posted to comp.groupware for comment and correction before being sent to the printer. All articles will be reproduced exactly as posted (headers may be included, and parts (e.g., data sets) may be moved to appendices and other changes making the articles more suitable for printing may be made). tvv@ncsc.org (Terry Myerson) began archiving comp.groupware 92.10.6. The archive is available by anonymous ftp from: avs.ncsc.org ( 128.109.178.23 ) in the directory: ~ftp/newsgroups/comp.groupware The archives are in mail folders named MONTH_YEAR. For example, to peruse all of the postings in the month of October, you could download the archive Oct_92, and execute % Mail -f Oct_92 Articles from comp.groupware are also available by anonymous FTP from: gorm.ruc.dk in the directory: ~groupware/art/comp/groupware/ Login as "anonymous" and give your user name as your password. Those without FTP access should send e-mail to: mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with "send usenet/news.answers/finding-sources" in the body to find out how to do FTP by e-mail. 4. If you are posting copyrighted work, indicate at the beginning of the article whether permission has been obtained. If you do not want an article reproduced, indicate this (e.g., Copyright - Net distribution only). 5. Authors should refer to "Guidelines for posting on Usenet" in the newsgroup "news.announce.newusers" to make sure they know to spell check their articles, etc. "Answers to Frequently Asked Questions", "Introduction to news.announce", "Hints on writing style for Usenet" available in the same newsgroup also contain information for new users. Do not post test messages to comp.groupware. There are special groups for testing. And tests should be as limited in their distribution as possible. This is basic information from "Guidelines for posting on Usenet". Posting of test messages inappropriately is considered abusive and will cause a loss of readership for your articles. Always use your Subject line to state the *topic* of your article as completely as possible (e.g., "Macintosh II voice-mail based real-time meeting software ready.", rather than "Meeting software"). Summary lines should indicate *what* your message says about the topic (e.g., "New meeting coordination software available via anonymous FTP"). Statements should always end with periods, questions with question marks (typically), and high energy, high impact declarations with exclamation points. These rules makes articles much easier for recipients to handle appropriately. If you ask a question, your subject line should include "question", "query", "(Q)" or should end with a "?". Questions should clearly explain your problem and surrounding issues. Otherwise, you will simply waste the time of those who want to help you. Tell people the kind of work you are doing or contemplating doing. This helps them provide the information you need. Indicate what efforts, if any, you have made thus far, and what information was found. Subject, Summary, and Keyword headers are scanned by many news reading programs, thus permitting readers to find your article easily. You will have your articles read more often if you select these carefully. 6. When you reply to a message, do not change the subject line or redirect follow-ups (unless you are changing the subject). Such changes make it harder for some news readers to follow the threads in a discussion. Include a "Summary" line which indicates specifically what your message says. This permits your article to be found even if it is a follow-up to an article with poorly chosen subject and keyword information. Please, do not post responses to articles you feel are inappropriate or abusive. (If you can not resist, consider alt.flame as an alternative newsgroup for your article [it has greater readership than comp.groupware]). If the author is not saying anything worth reading, enter the name in your "kill" file, and then no more of your time will be wasted by that person. If you feel that the author is saying something worth reading, but in an inappropriate way, respond by mail. Tell the author what you think is incorrect about the article. If possible, suggest how to accomplish the objective in an appropriate way (e. g., post to another newsgroup). If you have responded to a person by mail a few times without the desired effect, and you feel that the group as a whole could benefit by a solution to the problem, only then should you post an article. The nature of your article should be a suggestion, if possible, of how such problems can be avoided in the future. 7. Comp.groupware is read by over 47,000 people. Consider the cost to readers of any post. If even an obviously inappropriate article is distributed, one that just takes readers a few seconds to scan, and then skip or kill, the total time used is still large. With 36,000 readers, a post that takes an average of 1 second for each reader to deal with (i. e., examining the subject line) means a total of ten hours used (36,000 seconds / 3,600 seconds/hour = 10 hours). If the article uses up an average of four seconds, then the total time expenditure is 40 hours, the equivalent of a work week. This is probably the minimum time expenditure on any article that is even selected for scanning. So, if you spend a week preparing an article and then post it to comp.groupware, there will be a balance between your time investment and that used by readers, even if they only scan your article and make no response. The lack of a separate feedback channel is an unfortunate deficiency in the Network News system as it is currently structured. This analysis should not discourage anyone from posting a simple question. Some of the most interesting and valuable exchanges in comp.groupware have resulted from such questions. However, authors must not make such requests unnecessarily. On the other hand, a carefully prepared article or a report of an extensive project may not receive any comment at all. This could mean that the article is clear and error free. It could also mean it was not of sufficient interest to anyone to be read in detail. What can be assumed is that it was seriously considered. This is a result of the currently low traffic level in comp.groupware and high quality of articles posted. If your email reply to an author fails, try again using information in the signature lines. An X.500 directory information server can be consulted to find a person's email address. Read the informational article, "How to find people's email addresses" (in the newsgroup "news.answers"), so you know to contact the postmaster at the site of the person you are trying to reach, and so on. Do not post a reply until you have tried to reach the author by telephone, facsimile, or paper mail. If these fail, ask yourself if getting the reply through is worth ten hours of readers' time. If so, post the message. Do not post a message asking a person to send you an email address, unless your letter must be kept private (If this is true, consider using encryption). If it is not of general interest, use only the person's name as the subject (e.g., "To: Foo Bar"). If other readers might find it interesting, also give full subject information. Similarly, do not broadcast requests for information you can obtain from a known source. Requests such as, "What are the contents of book Foo published by Bar" are not appropriate. This information can normally be obtained by a short telephone call and a few minutes of work by someone being paid to provide that service. Let's not deprive someone of a job and at the same time get comp.groupware readers fired because they are wasting all their time reading unnecessary articles :-). Post long articles as a single unit if they are less than 30,000 characters. Otherwise, post separate sections as follow-ups to the first, breaking at meaningful places. This permits the sections to be treated as a single unit, thus minimizing expenditure of attention on the article. The cost of transmitting articles is negligible, so long posts that take one second to delete "cost" the same as short ones. Disregarding these considerations or a lack of self discipline in following them will result in defensive attention management. That is, certain authors will not be read at all by many readers or valuable discussions will take place by email instead of being posted. This would have the unfortunate effect of fractionating the joint awareness that permits the comp.groupware readership to function as a group. Thus, it is recommended that authors who prefer entertainment to rigor in their news reading, post to other newsgroups. ------- This article compiled with assistance from numerous readers of comp.groupware. Corrections, comments, and suggestions to: David S. Stodolsky Messages: + 45 46 75 77 11 x 24 41 Department of Computer Science Tel: + 45 31 95 92 82 Bldg. 20.1, Roskilde University Center Internet: david@ruc.dk Post Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark Fax: + 45 46 75 42 01 From roseman@fsc.cpsc.ucalgay.ca (Mark Roseman) Subject: Re: GroupKit? In-Reply-To: John W Gintell's message of Tue, 12 Jan 1993 00:19:16 GMT Message-ID: Sender: news@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (News Manager) Organization: /home/grads/roseman/.organization References: <1993Jan8.172421.15436@utagraph.uta.edu> <1993Jan12.001916.19980@mips2.ma30.bull.com> Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 17:39:13 GMT Lines: 9 groupkit is available for ftp at cpsc.ucalgary.ca as /pub/GroupKit1.0.tar.Z which includes the toolkit, a whole pile of little examples, and a large set of docs. mark -- ============================================================================== Mark Roseman --- Groupware'R'Us Dept. of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alta. T2N 1N4 (403) 220-7691 roseman@cpsc.ucalgary.ca Fax: (403) 284-4707 From prs9k@brain.med.virginia.edu (Phil Scarr) Subject: Looking for group-based doc management system Message-ID: <1993Jan13.154420.15295@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: Neuroclinical Trials Center, University of Virginia Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 15:44:20 GMT Lines: 12 Our office is looking for group-based document management software which will work with our current installation of WordPerfect users. We need to register versions of documents and archive old versions. Any help in this area would be greatly appreciated. -Phil -- PHIL SCARR \ We are Microsoft... / (o) 804.243.0229 University of / OS/2 is irrelevant. \ (f) 804.243.0290 Virginia, \ UNIX is irrelevant. / prs9k@Virginia.EDU Neurosurgery / Openness is futile. \ prs9k@Virginia.BITNET HP-UX is my life!\ Prepare to be assimilated... / ...uunet!virginia!prs9k From colston@gid.co.uk (Colston Sanger) Newsgroups: comp.groupware,comp.cog-eng,comp.human-factors,uk.events Subject: UK CSCW SIG seminar on Space in Cooperative Settings, 2nd announcement Keywords: CSCW, seminar, space Message-ID: <365@sixnine.gid.co.uk> Date: 13 Jan 93 16:09:01 GMT Followup-To: poster Organization: GID Ltd, Upper Basildon, Reading, UK Lines: 276 UK CSCW SIG The Importance of Space in Cooperative Settings Joint meeting with the British HCI Group 10.00 a.m., Tuesday, 26 January, 1993 Venue: Department of Trade & Industry Kingsgate House, 66-74 Victoria Street London SW1 This meeting sets out to explore the role of space in cooperative work. At a microscopic level, spatial settings might provide a means of effectively and naturally managing conversations. At a macroscopic level, a spatial metaphor might be more appropriate for some applications than the more common office desktop metaphor, particularly where those applications involve the organisation of large-scale cooperative work. Spatial metaphors, particularly `rooms' metaphors, have become increasingly popular in CSCW. In the next few years, technical developments such as the advent of affordable Virtual Reality technology will revolutionise human computer interaction, and will make it possible to build more powerful representations of these spatial metaphors. The meeting brings together speakers from diverse backgrounds. They will address topics such as the social organisation of space and the affordances provided by space for cooperative work, and will share results from CSCW projects that have utilised spatial metaphors. It is expected that there will be one or more demonstrations from these projects, and also of the upcoming Virtual Reality systems. Organiser: Steve Benford, University of Nottingham Note: For security reasons the DTI stipulates that attendance is by prior registration only. Please complete and return a registration form or contact: Patrick Holligan LUTCHI Research Centre Tel: (0509) 222 694 (direct) E-mail: P.J.Holligan@lut.ac.uk **************************************************************** P R O G R A M M E 10.00 Coffee, registration 10.30 Introduction Steve Benford, University of Nottingham 10:45 Investigation of the Social Organisation of Space John Hughes, University of Lancaster 11:15 A Space Based Model for User Interaction in Shared Synthetic Environments Lennart Fahlen, Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) 11:45 Extending the Space in Media Space: Affordances, Multiple-Views and Remote Movement Bill Gaver, Xerox EuroPARC 12:15 State of the Art Desktop Virtual Reality (+ demonstration) Andy Tait, Dimension International 12:45 LUNCH 14:15 CyCo - Cooperation in Cyberspace Robert Ingram, Steve Benford, University of Nottingham 14:45 Developing Spatial Models for Cooperative Work John Bowers, University of Manchester 15.15 TEA 15:30 Project BRICC: Building Real Rooms Using Virtual Rooms David Leevers, The BICC Group 16:00 CLOSING DISCUSSION 16:30 FINISH *************************************************************** T h e U K C S C W S I G CSCW SIG Background In early 1990 the members of the Communication and Distributed Systems and Human Interface clubs (both of which are supported by the UK Joint Framework for Information Technology - JFIT) were simultaneously suggesting that there was a need for a special interest group to support the growing UK interest in computer supported cooperative work. As a result CSCW SIG was founded, appropriately given the nature of the subject, with the support of both clubs. CSCW SIG Aims The aims of CSCW SIG include those of supporting the community of researchers, developers, and users of CSCW, and generally assisting the development of the subject. CSCW SIG Activities To date the SIG has focused its activities on providing opportunities for discussion by organising and running meetings, and the dissemination of information through publications. The SIG held its inaugural meeting in May 1990 and to date has held ten well-supported meetings. The SIG's current programme of meetings for 1993 includes: 16 March 1993 CSCW Issues for Mobile and Remote Workers 15 June 1993 CSCW Requirements Capture/Requirements Engineering October 1993 Evaluation in CSCW The SIG has made substantial efforts to ensure that the results of its meetings are disseminated in a public form. A book series, entitled `The Computer Supported Cooperative Work Series', has been negotiated, in conjunction with the British Computer Society, for publication by Springer-Verlag London Ltd. The series will be launched in early 1993 and an advance information leaflet and order form is now available. CSCW SIG Membership Membership of CSCW SIG stands at around eight hundred members: it is open, free, international, and continues to grow. All you have to do to join is ask to be put on the SIG's mailing list. If you have registered an interest in the UK JFIT CSCW Programme, you will automatically become a member of CSCW SIG. CSCW SIG Organisation The SIG is run by a small committee, convened by Stephen Scrivener, which meets roughly twice a year. There are also two working groups, one dealing with seminars and publications (convened by Dan Diaper and Colston Sanger), the other dealing with interdisciplinary issues and research (convened by Mike Sharples). Other working groups are envisaged and anyone interested in forming one (e.g., on standards for CSCW) should contact Stephen Scrivener - Email: S.A.Scrivener@lut.ac.uk. CSCW SIG and the JFIT Programme A UK CSCW Programme has been initiated by JFIT (Joint Framework for Information Technology). The CSCW SIG will be taking an active part in support of the JFIT Programme. At present three main functions for the SIG are envisaged: 1. Organisation of seminars etc for programme-specific purposes and awareness 2. Provision of communication links between the JFIT Programme and SIG members 3. Provision of advice and expertise where appropriate. Further Information If you would like further information on the CSCW SIG (e.g. future meetings, book series, working groups etc) or would like to join please contact: Patrick Holligan, LUTCHI Research Centre, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics. Tel: (0509) 222694 - Fax: (0509) 610815 Email: P.J.Holligan@lut.ac.uk ******************************************************************* THE BRITISH HCI GROUP You can keep in touch with developments in Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design and related fields by joining the British HCI Group. If you consider yourself to be an active member of the User Interface Design or HCI communities in the UK, or if you are interested in keeping abreast of this fast moving field, it is both intellectually and financially well worth while to become a member of the Group. The British HCI Group provides a number of useful services to the HCI community, in particular keeping its members informed about ongoing developments and HCI events in the UK and worldwide. It also organises regular meetings on a variety of topics providing an opportunity for attendees to find out about interesting research and practice and to meet others involved the field. The Group's annual conference is the main UK event in the User Interface Design and HCI calendar and includes a variety of useful tutorials for those who want to learn more about better design and recent advances in the field. Members are offered substantial discounts on fees for meetings and the major conferences in the field. The HCI Group annual membership fee is: 17 pounds for BCS members 22 pounds for non-BCS members 5 pounds for students The fee will bring you a variety of services and benefits including: * A newsletter containing HCI Group news, up to date information about what's on, reports on recent events, and book reviews. * Rapid delivery of the latest news, events and activities via our electronic mail distribution list if desired. * Two thirds off the price of Interacting with Computers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, published by Butterworth-Heineman. This is a quality, international, quarterly journal owned by the HCI Group. * Discounts on Group meetings, symposia and the annual British HCI, and triennial INTERACT conferences. * A substantial discount on the major, annual, international HCI event; the CHIconference. This includes the INTERCHI'93 Conference to be held in Amsterdam 24-29th April 1993. * The Group's Directory of Members, a valuable source of contacts if you are looking for expertise, services, or just a like mind. Corporate membership also available (provides 3 copies of the Newsletter, 3 discounts on day meetings and mailing to a distribution list for all members of the organisation if desired). Forthcoming events organised by the group in 1993 include: ' Making Human Factors work in organisations'; an HCI Group and the Organisational Aspects Special Interest Group of the Human Interface Club 'Tools for Usability Evaluation'; a joint meeting between HCI Group and the NPL Usability Forum 'Graphical UIMS in practice'; an HCI Group meeting Application forms and further information may be obtained by contacting: Mr Richard Wilson Membership Secretary The British HCI Group Department of Computing Science University of Glasgow GLASGOW G12 8QQ tel: 041-330 4256 fax: 041-330 4913 email: membsec@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk ******************************************************************* UK CSCW SIG MEETING REGISTRATION FORM The Importance of Space in Cooperative Settings 10.00 a.m., Tuesday, 26 January, 1993 Venue: Department of Trade & Industry Kingsgate House, 66-74 Victoria Street London SW1 I wish to attend the UK CSCW SIG seminar on `The Importance of Space in Cooperative Settings' and enclose my cheque for 35 UK pounds to cover registration and refreshments. Please make cheques payable to `CSCW SIG'. Invoices and/or receipts can be provided on request. A 50% discount is available for bona fide research students. Please tick opposite if you prefer a vegetarian lunch. [ ] Name: ........................................................................ Affiliation: ................................................................. Address: ..................................................................... ............................................................................... Tel/Fax/E-mail: ...................................................... For security reasons the DTI stipulates that attendance is by prior registration only. Registrations cannot be accepted after 12 noon on the closing date. Please complete and return this email form, and send your remittance by the closing date of Friday, 22 January 1993 to: Patrick Holligan, LUTCHI Research Centre, Department of Computer Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Loughborough LE11 3TU Tel. 0509 222 694 (direct line) Fax: 0509 610 815 E-mail: P.J.Holligan@lut.ac.uk ENDS -- GID - software engineers to the quality 1 Captain's Gorse, Upper Basildon, Reading, Berks RG8 8SZ, UK UUCP: colston@gid.co.uk Tel/Fax: +44 491 671964 From kling@ics.uci.edu (Rob Kling) Subject: Organizational Analysis in Computer Science Message-ID: <9301151223.aa11036@q2.ics.uci.edu> Newsgroups: comp.groupware Lines: 1203 Date: 15 Jan 93 20:23:11 GMT Long: 1200 lines. I posted a much shorter vesrion whihc will appear in CACM in Feb '93. Tis version says much more about research in Organizatonal Informatics, including groupware .... Best wishes, /Rob ========================== Organizational Analysis in Computer Science Rob Kling Department of Information & Computer Science and Center for Research on Infromation Technology and Organizations University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA 92717, USA kling@ics.uci.edu (714-856-5955) January 13, 1993 [Working Draft 12a] Note: To appear: The Information Society, 9(2) (Mar-Jun, 1993). ABSTRACT Computer Science is hard pressed in the US to show broad utility to help justify billion dollar research programs and the value of educating well over 40,000 Bachelor of Science and Master of Science specialists annually in the U.S. The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the U.S. National Research Council has recently issued a report, "Computing the Future (Hartmanis and Lin, 1992)" which sets a new agenda for Computer Science. The report recommends that Computer Scientists broaden their conceptions of the discipline to include computing applications and domains to help understand them. This short paper argues that many Computer Science graduates need some skills in analyzing human organizations to help develop appropriate systems requirements since they are trying to develop high performance computing applications that effectively support higher performance human organizations. It is time for academic Computer Science to embrace organizational analysis (the field of Organizational Informatics) as a key area of research and instruction. INTRODUCTION Computer Science is being pressed on two sides to show broad utility for substantial research and educational support. For example, the High Performance Computing Act will provide almost two billion dollars for research and advanced development. Its advocates justified it with arguments that specific technologies, such as parallel computing and wideband nets, are necessary for social and economic development. In the US, Computer Science academic programs award well over 30,000 Bachelor of Science (BS) and almost 10,000 Master of Science (MS) degrees annually. Some of these students enter PhD programs and many work on projects which emphasize mathematical Computer Science. But many of these graduates also take computing jobs for which they are inadequately educated, such as helping to develop high performance computing applications to improve the performance of human organizations. These dual pressures challenge leading Computer Scientists to broaden their conceptions of the discipline to include an understanding of key application domains, including computational science and commercial information systems. An important report that develops this line of analysis, "Computing the Future" (CTF) (Hartmanis and Lin, 1992), was recently issued by the National Computing and Telecommunications Board of the U.S. National Research Council. CTF is a welcome report that argues that academic Computer Scientists must acknowledge the driving forces behind the substantial Federal research support for the discipline. The explosive growth of computing and demand for CS in the last decade has been driven by a diverse array of applications and new modes of computing in diverse social settings. CTF takes a strong and useful position in encouraging all Computer Scientists to broaden our conceptions of the discipline and to examine computing in the context of interesting applications. CTF's authors encourage Computer Scientists to envision new technologies in the social contexts in which they will be used. They identify numerous examples of computer applications in earth science, computational biology, medical care, electronic libraries and commercial computing that can provide significant value to people and their organizations. These assessments rest on concise and tacit analyses of the likely design, implementation within organizations, and uses of these technologies. For example, CTF's stories of improved computational support for modelling are based on rational models of organizational behavior. They assume that professionals, scientists, and policy-makers use models to help improve their decisions. But what if organizations behave differently when they use models? For example suppose policy makers use models to help rationalize and legitimize decisions which are made without actual reference to the models? One cannot discriminate between these divergent roles of modelling in human organizations based upon the intentions of researchers and system designers. The report tacitly requires that the CS community develop reliable knowledge, based on systematic research, to support effective analysis of the likely designs and uses of computerized systems. CTF tacitly requires an ability to teach such skills to CS practitioners and students. Without a disciplined skill in analyzing human organizations, Computer Scientists' claims about the usability and social value of specific technologies is mere opinion, and bears a significant risk of being misleading. Further, Computer Scientists who do not have refined social analytical skills sometimes conceive and promote technologies that are far less useful or more costly than they claim. Effective CS practitioners who "compute for the future" in organizations need some refined skills in organizational analysis to understand appropriate systems requirements and the conditions that transform high performance computing into high performance human organizations. Since CTF does not spell out these tacit implications, I'd like to explain them here. BROADENING COMPUTER SCIENCE: FROM COMPUTABILITY TO USABILITY The usability of systems and software is a key theme in the history of CS. We must develop theoretical foundations for the discipline that give the deepest insights in to what makes systems usable for various people, groups and organizations. Traditional computer scientists commonly refer to mathematics as the theoretical foundations of CS. However, mathematical formulations give us limited insights into understanding why and when some computer systems are more usable than others. Certain applications, such as supercomputing and computational science are evolutionary extensions of traditional scientific computation, despite their new direction with rich graphical front ends for visualizing enormous mounds of data. But other, newer modes of computing, such as networking and microcomputing, change the distribution of applications. While they support traditional numerical computation, albeit in newer formats such as spreadsheets, they have also expanded the diversity of non-numerical computations. They make digitally represented text and graphics accessible to tens of millions of people. These technological advances are not inconsistent with mathematical foundations in CS, such as Turing machine formulations. But the value of these formats for computation is not well conceptualized by the foundational mathematical models of computation. For example, text editing could be conceptualized as a mathematical function that transforms an initial text and a vector of incremental alterations into a revised text. Text formatting can be conceptualized as a complex function mapping text strings into spatial arrays. These kinds of formulations don't help us grasp why many people find "what you see is what you get" editors as much more intuitively appealing than a system that links line editors, command-driven formatting languages, and text compilers in series. Nor do our foundational mathematical models provide useful ways of conceptualizing some key advances in even more traditional elements of computer systems such as operating systems and database systems. For example, certain mathematical models underlie the major families of database systems. But one can't rely on mathematics alone to assess how well networks, relations, or object-entities serve as representations for the data stored in an airline reservation system. While mathematical analysis can help optimize the efficiency of disk space in storing the data, they can't do much to help airlines understand the kinds of services that will make such systems most useful for reservationists, travel agents and even individual travellers. An airline reservation system in use is not simply a closed technical system. It is an open socio-technical system (Hewitt, 1986; Kling, 1992). Mathematical analysis can play a central role in some areas of CS, and an important role in many areas. But we cannot understand important aspects of usability if we limit ourselves to mathematical theories. The growing emphasis of usability is one of the most dominant of the diverse trends in computing. The usability tradition has deep roots in CS, and has influenced the design of programming languages and operating systems for over 25 years. Specific topics in each of these areas also rest on mathematical analysis which Computer Scientists could point to as "the foundations" of the respective subdisciplines. But Computer Scientists envision many key advances as design conceptions rather than as mathematical theories. For example, integrated programming environments ease software development. But their conception and popularity is not been based on deeper formal foundations for programming languages. However, the growth of non-numerical applications for diverse professionals, including text processing, electronic mail, graphics, and multimedia should place a premium on making computer systems relatively simple to use. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is now considered a core subdiscipline of CS. The integration of HCI into the core of CS requires us to expand our conception of the theoretical foundations of the discipline. While every computational interface is reducible to a Turing computation, the foundational mathematical models of CS do not (and could not) provide a sound theoretical basis for understanding why some interfaces are more effective for some groups of people than others. The theoretical foundations of effective computer interfaces must rest on sound theories of human behavior and their empirical manifestations (cf. Ehn, 1991, Grudin, 1989). Interfaces also involve capabilities beyond the primary information processing features of a technology. They entail ways in which people learn about systems and ways to manage the diverse data sets that routinely arise in using many computerized systems (Kling, 1992). Understanding the diversity and character of these interfaces, that are required to make many systems usable, rests in an understanding the way that people and groups organize their work and expertise with computing. Appropriate theories of the diverse interfaces that render many computer systems truly useful must rest, in part, on theories of work and organization. There is a growing realization, as networks tie users together at a rapidly rising rate, that usability cannot generally be determined without our considering how computer systems are shaped by and also alter interdependencies in groups and organizations. The newly-formed subdiscipline of Computer Supported Cooperative Work and newly-coined term "groupware" are responses to this realization (Greif, 1988; Galegher, Kraut and Egido, 1990). BROADENING COMPUTER SCIENCE: FROM HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING TO HIGH PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS The arguments of CTF go beyond a focus on usable interface designs to claims that computerized systems will improve the performance of organizations. The report argues that the US should invest close to a billion dollars a year in CS research because of the resulting economic and social gains. These are important claims, to which critics can seek systematic evidence. For example, one can investigate the claim that 20 years of major computing R&D and corporate investment in the US has helped provide proportionate economic and social value. CTF is filled with numerous examples where computer-based systems provided value to people and organizations. The tough question is whether the overall productive value of these investments is worth the overall acquisition and operation costs. While it is conventional wisdom that computerization must improve productivity, a few researchers began to see systemic possibilities of counter-productive computerization in the early 1980s (King and Kraemer, 1981). In the last few years economists have found it hard to give unambiguously affirmative answers to this question. The issue has been termed "The Productivity Paradox," based on a comment attributed to Nobel laureate Robert Solow who remarked that "computers are showing up everywhere except in the [productivity] statistics (Dunlop and Kling, 1991a)." Economists are still studying the conditions under which computerization contributes to organizational productivity, and how to measure it [1]. But even if computerization proves to be a productive investment, in the net, in most economic sectors, there is good reason to believe that many organizations get much less value from their computing investments than they could and should. There is no automatic link between computerization and improved productivity. While many computer systems have been usable and useful, productivity gains require that their value exceed all of their costs. There are numerous potential slips in translating high performance computing into cost-effective improvements in organizational performance. Some technologies are superb for well-trained experts, but are difficult for less experienced people or "casual users." Many technologies, such as networks and mail systems, often require extensive technical support, thus adding hidden costs (Kling, 1992). Further, a significant body of empirical research shows that the social processes by which computer systems are introduced and organized makes a substantial difference in their value to people, groups and organizations (Lucas, 1981; Kraemer, et. al. 1985; Orlikowski, 1992). Most seriously, not all presumably appropriate computer applications fit a person or group's work practices. While they may make sense in a simplified world, they can actually complicate or misdirect real work. Group calendars are but one example of systems that can sound useful, but are often useless because they impose burdensome record keeping demands (Grudin, 1989). In contrast, electronic mail is one of the most popular applications in office support systems, even when other capabilities, like group calendars, are ignored (Bullen and Bennett, 1991). However, senders are most likely to share information with others when the system helps provide social feedback about the value of their efforts or they have special incentives (Sproull and Kiesler, 1991; Orlikowski, 1992). Careful attention to the social arrangements or work can help Computer Scientists improve some systems designs, or also appreciate which applications may not be effective unless work arrangements are changed when the system is introduced. The uses and social value of most computerized systems can not be effectively ascertained from precise statements of their basic design principles and social purposes. They must be analyzed within the social contexts in which they will be used. Effective social analyses go beyond accounting for formal tasks and purposes to include informal social behavior, available resources, and the interdependencies between key groups (Cotterman and Senn, 1992). Many of the BS and MS graduates of CS departments find employment on projects where improved computing should enhance the performance of specific organizations or industries. Unfortunately, few of these CS graduates have developed an adequate conceptual basis for understanding when information systems will actually improve organizational performance. Consequently, many of them are prone to recommend systems-based solutions whose structure or implementation within organizations would be problematic. ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATICS Organizational Informatics denotes a field which studies the development and use of computerized information systems and communication systems in organizations. It includes studies of their conception, design, effective implementation within organizations, maintenance, use, organizational value, conditions that foster risks of failures, and their effects for people and an organization's clients. It is an intellectually rich and practical research area. Organizational Informatics is a relatively new label. In Europe, the term Informatics is the name of many academic departments which combine both CS and Information Systems. In North America, Business Schools are the primary institutional home of Information Systems research and teaching. But this location is a mixed blessing. It brings IS research closer to organizational studies. But the institutional imperatives of business schools lead IS researchers to emphasize the development and use of systems in a narrow range of organizations -- businesses generally, and often service industry firms. It excludes information systems in important social sectors such as health care, military operations, air-traffic control, libraries, home uses, and so on. And Information Systems research tries to avoid messy issues which many practicing Computer Scientists encounter: developing requirements for effective systems and mitigating the major risks to people and organizations who depend upon them. The emerging field of Organizational Informatics builds upon research conducted under rubrics like Information Systems and Information Engineering. But it is more wide ranging than either of these fields are in practice[2]. Organizational Informatics Research In the last 20 years a loosely organized community of some dozens of researchers have produced a notable body of systematic scientific research in Organizational Informatics. These studies examine a variety of topics, including: * how system designers translate people's preferences into requirements; * the functioning of software development teams in practice; * the conditions that foster and impede the implementation of computerized systems within organizations; * how people and organizations use systems in practice; * the roles of computerized systems in altering work, group communication, power relationships, and organizational practices. Researchers have extensively studied some of these topics, such as computerization and changing work, appear in synoptic review articles (Kling and Dunlop, in press). In contrast, researchers have recently begun to examine other topics, such software design (Winograd and Flores, 1986; Kyng and Greenbaum, 1991), and have recently begun to use careful empirical methods (e.g. Suchman, 1983; Bentley, et. al, 1992; Fish, et. al., 1993). I cannot summarize the key theories and rich findings of these diverse topics in a few paragraphs. But I would like to comment upon a few key aspects of this body of research. Computer Systems Use in Social Worlds Many studies contrast actual patterns of systems design, implementation, use or impacts with predictions made by Computer Scientists and professional commentators. A remarkable fraction of these accounts are infused with a hyper-rational and under- socialized view of people, computer systems, organizations and social life in general. Computer Scientists found that rule driven conceptions to be powerful ways to abstract domains like compilers. But many Computer Scientists extend them to be a tacit organizing frame for understanding whole computer systems, their developers, their users and others who live and work with them. Organizations are portrayed as generally cooperative systems with relatively simple and clear goals. Computer systems are portrayed as generally coherent and adequate for the tasks for which people use them. People are portrayed as generally obedient and cooperative participants in a highly structured system with numerous tacit rules to be obeyed, such as doing their jobs as they are formally described. Using data that is contained in computer systems, and treating it as information or knowledge, is a key element of these accounts. Further, computer systems are portrayed as powerful, and often central, agents of organizational change. This Systems Rationalist perspective infuses many accounts of computer systems design, development, and use in diverse application domains, including CASE tools, instructional computing, models in support of public policy assessments, expert systems, groupware, supercomputing, and network communications (Kling, 1980; Kling, Scherson and Allen, 1992). All conceptual perspectives are limited and distort "reality." When Organizational Informatics researchers systematically examine the design practices in particular organizations, how specific groups develop computer systems, or how various people and groups use computerized systems, they find an enormous range of fascinating and important human behavior which lies outside the predictive frame of Systems Rationalism. Sometimes these behaviors are relatively minor in overall importance. But in many cases they are so significant as to lead Organizational Informatics researchers to radically reconceptualize the processes which shape and are shaped by computerization. There are several alternative frames for reconceptualizing computerization as alternatives to Systems Rationalism. The alternatives reflect, in part, the paradigmatic diversity of the social sciences. But all of these reconceptions situate computer systems and organizations in richer social contexts and with more complex and multivalent social relations than does systems rationalism. Two different kinds of observations help anchor these abstractions. Those who wish to understand the dynamics of model usage in public agencies must appreciate the institutional relationships which influence the organization's behavior. For example, to understand economic forecasting by the US Congress and the Executive branch's Office of Management and Budget, one must appreciate the institutional relations between Congress and the Executive branch. They are not well described by Systems Rationalist conceptions because they were designed to continually differ with each other in their perspectives and preferred policies. That is one meaning of "checks and balances" in the fundamental design of the US Federal Government. My colleagues, Ken Kraemer and John King, titled their book about Federal economic modelling, DataWars (Kraemer, et. al., 1985). Even this title doesn't make much sense within a Systems Rationalist framework. Modelling can be a form of intellectual exploration. It can also be a medium of communication, negotiation, and persuasion. The social relationships between modelers, people who use them and diverse actors in Federal policymaking made these socially mediated roles of models sometimes most important. In these situations, an alternative view of organizations as coalitions of interest groups was a more appropriate conceptualization. And within this coalitional view of organizations, a conception of econometric models as persuasion support systems rather than as decision support systems sometimes is most appropriate. Organizational Informatics researchers found that political views of organizations and systems developments within them apply to many private organizations as well as to explicitly political public agencies. Another major idea to emerge from the broad body of Organizational Informatics research is that the social patterns which characterize the design, development, uses and consequences of computerized systems are dependent on the particular ecology of social relationships between participants. This idea may be summarized by saying that the processes and consequences of computerization are "context dependent." In practice, this means that the analyst must be careful in generalizing from one organizational setting to another. While data wars might characterize econometric modelling on Capitol Hill, we do not conclude that all computer modelling should be interpreted as persuasion support systems. In some settings, models are used to explore the effects of policy alternatives without immediate regard for their support as media for communication, negotiation or persuasion. At other times, the same model might be used (or abused with cooked data) as a medium of persuasion. The brief accounts of models for global warming in CTF fit a Systems Rationalist account. Their uses might appear much less "scientific" if they were studied within the actual policy processes within which they are typically used. Repercussions for Systems Design Even when computerized systems are used as media of intellectual exploration, Organizational Informatics researchers find that social relationships influence the ways that people use computerized systems. Christine Bullen and John Bennett (1991) studied 25 organizations that used groupware with diverse modeules such as databases, group calendars, text annotating facilities and electronic mail. They found that the electronic mail modules were almost universally valued, while other system facilities were often unused. In a recent study, Sharyn Ladner and Hope Tillman examined the use of the Internet by university and corporate librarians. While many of them found data access through databases and file transfer to be important services, they also reported that electronic mail was perhaps the most critical Internet feature for them. The participants in our study tell us something that we may have forgotten in our infatuation with the new forms of information made available through the Internet. And that is their need for community. To be sure, our respondents use the Internet to obtain information not available in any other format, to access databases ... that provide new efficiencies in their work, new ways of working. But their primary use is for communication. Special librarians tend to be isolated in the workplace -- the only one in their subject specialty (in the case of academe), or the only librarian in their organization (in the case of a corporate library). Time and time again our respondents expressed this need to talk to someone -- to learn what is going on in their profession, to bounce ideas off others, to obtain information from people, not machines. There are tremendous implications from the Internet technology in community formation -- the Internet may indeed provide a way to increase community among scholars, including librarians. The danger we face at this juncture in time, as we attach library resources to the Internet, is to focus all of our energies on the machine-based resources at the expense of our human- based resources, i.e., ourselves (Ladner and Tillman, 1992). In these studies, Organizational Informatics researchers have developed a socially rich view of work with and around computing, of computing within a social world. These studies have strong repercussions for the design of software. A good designer cannot assume that the majority of effort should go into the "computational centerpiece" of a system, while devoting minor efforts to supporting communication facilities. One of my colleagues designed a modelling system for managers in a major telephone company, after completing an extensive requirements analysis. However, as an afterthought, he added a simple mail system in a few days work. He was surprised to find that the people who used these systems regularly used his crude electronic mail system, while they often ignored interesting modelling capabilities. Such balances of attention also have significant repercussions. Many people need good mail systems, not just crude ones: systems which include facile editors, ease in exporting and importing files, and effective mail management (Kling and Covi, 1993). Assessing people's preferences for systems' designs is an exercise in social inquiry. While rapid prototyping may help improve designs for some systems, it is less readily applicable to systems which are used by diverse groups at numerous locations. Computer scientists are beginning to develop more reliable methods of social inquiry to better understand which systems designs will be most useful (Bentley, et. al. 1992; Kyng and Greenbaum, 1991). Root and his colleagues (1993) recently reported the way that the explicit use of social theory helped them design more effective group meeting systems. Unfortunately, these newer methods are rarely taught to CS students. When computer specialists build an imbalanced system, it should not be a surprise when the resulting organizational value of their efforts is very suboptimal. System Security and Reliability In a simplified engineering model of computing, the reliability of products is assured through extensive testing in a development lab. The social world of technology use not perceived as shaping the reliability of systems, except through irascible human factors, such as "operator errors." An interesting and tragic illustration of the limitations of this view can be found in some recent studies of the causes of death and maiming by an electron accelerator which was designed to help cure cancer, the Therac-25 (Jacky, 1991, Leveson and Turner, 1992). The Therac-25 was designed and marketed in the mid 1980s by a Canadian firm AECL as an advanced medical technology. It featured complete software control over all major functions (supported by a DEC PDP-11), among other innovations. Previous machines included electro-mechanical interlocks to raise and lower radiation shields. Several thousand people were effectively treated with the Therac-25 each year. However, between 1985 and 1987 there were six known accidents in which several people died in the US. Other were seriously maimed or injured [3]. Both studies concur that there were subtle but important flaws in the design of the Therac-25's software and hardware. AECL's engineers tried to patch the existing hardware and (finally) software when they learned of some of the mishaps. But they treated each fix as the final repair. Both studies show how the continuing series of mishaps was exacerbated by diverse organizational arrangements. Jacky claims that pressures for speedy work by radiological technicians coupled with an interface design that did not enhance important error messages was one of many causes of the accidents. Leveson and Turner differ in downplaying the working conditions of the Therac-25's operators and emphasize the flawed social system for communicating the seriousness of problems to Federal regulators and other hospitals. Both studies observe that it is unlikely for the best of companies to develop perfect error-free systems without high quality feedback from users. Their recommendations differ: Jacky discusses the licensing of system developers and the regulation of computerized medical systems to improve minimal standards of saftey. Leveson and Turner propose extensive education and training of software engineers and more effective communication between manufacturers and their customers. However, both studies indicate that an understanding of the safety of computer systems must go beyond the laboratory and extend into the organizational settings where it is used. In the case of the Therac-25, it required understanding a complex web of interorganizational relationships, as well as the technical design and operation of the equipment. Nancy Leveson (1992) points out that most major disasters technological disasters in the last 20 years "involved serious organizational and management deficiencies." Hughes, Randall and Shapiro (1992:119) observe that British no civil collision in UK air space has been attributed to air traffic control failures. But their Mediator control system was failing regularly and had no backup during the period that they studied it. They observe that the reliability of the British air traffic control system resides in totality of the relevant social and technical systems, rather than in a single component. The need for this kind of organizational understanding is unfortunately slighted in the CS academic world today. CTF discusses only those aspects of computer system reliability which are amenable to understanding through laboratory-like studies (Hartmanis and Lin, 1992:110-111). But cases of safety critical systems, like the Therac-25 and British Air Traffic Control, indicate why some Computer Scientists must be willing to undertake (and teach) organizational analysis. Worldviews and Surprises about Computerization These few paragraphs barely sketch the highlights of a fertile and significant body of research about computer systems in use. Perhaps the most important simplification for traditional computer scientists is to appreciate how people and their organizations are situated in a social world and consequently compute within a social world. People act in relationship to others in various ways and concerns of belonging, status, resources, and power are often central. The web of people's relationships extend beyond various formally defined group and organizational boundaries (Kling and Scacchi, 1982; Kling, 1987; Kling, 1992). People construct their worlds, including the meanings and uses of information technologies, through their social interactions. This view is, of course, not new to social scientists. On the other hand, there is no specific body of social theory which can easily be specialized for "the case of computing," and swiftly produce good theories for Organizational Informatics as trivial deductions. The best research in Organizational Informatics draws upon diverse theoretical and methodological approaches within the social sciences with a strong effort to select those which best explain diverse aspects of computerization. ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATICS WITHIN COMPUTER SCIENCE CTF places dual responsibilities on Computer Scientists. One responsibility is to produce a significant body of applicable research. The other responsibility is to educate a significant fraction of CS students to be more effective in conceiving and implementing systems that will enhance organizational performance. It may be possible to organize research and instruction so as to decouple these responsibilities. For example, molecular biologists play only a small role in training doctors. However, CS departments act like an integrated Medical school and Biology department. They are the primary academic locations for training degreed computing specialists, and they conduct a diverse array of less applicable and more applicable research. In practice, the research interests of CS faculty shape the range of topics taught in CS departments, especially the 150 PhD granting departments. CS curricula mirror major areas of CS research and the topics which CS faculty understand through their own educations and subsequent research. As a consequence, CS courses are likely to avoid important CS topics which appear a bit foreign to the instructor. An interesting example of this coupling can be illustrated by CTF, in a brief description of public-key encryption systems and digital signatures (Hartmanis and Lin, 1992:27). In the simple example, Bob and Alice can send messages reliably if each maintains a secret key. Nothing is said about the social complications of actually keeping keys secret. The practical problems are similar to those of managing passwords, although some operational details differ because the 100 digit keys may be stored on media like magstripe cards rather than paper. In real organizations, people lose or forget their password and can lose the media which store their keys. Also, some passwords can be shared by a group of with shifting membership, and the "secret key" can readily become semi-public. The main point is that the management of keys is a critical element of cryptographic security in practice. But Computer Scientists are prone to teach courses on cryptography as exercises in applied mathematics, such as number theory and Galois theory, and to skirt the vexing practical problems of making encryption a practical organizational activity. Today, most of the 40,000 people who obtain BS and MS degrees in CS each year in the U.S. have no opportunities for systematic exposure to reliable knowledge about the best design strategies, common uses, effective implementation, and assessments of value of computing in a social world (Lewis, 1989). Yet a substantial fraction of these students go on to work for organizations attempting to produce or maintain systems that improve organizational performance without a good conceptual basis for their work. Consequently, many of them develop systems that underperform in organizational terms even when they are technically refined. They also recommend ineffective implementation procedures and are sometimes even counterproductive. One defensible alternative to my position is that CS departments should not take on any form of organizational analysis. They should aggressively take a role akin to Biology departments rather than taking on any instructional or research roles like Medical schools. To be sincere, this position requires a high level of restraint by academic Computer Scientists. First and foremost, they should cease from talking about the uses, value or even problems of computerized systems that would be used in any organizational setting. Research proposals would be mute about any conceivable application of research results. Further, they should make effective efforts to insure that anyone who employs their graduates should be aware that they may have no special skills in understanding organizational computing. It would take an aggressive "truth in advertising" campaign to help make it clear that Computer Scientists have no effective methods for understanding computerization in the social world. Further, Computer Scientists would forsake their commitments to subfields like software engineering which tacitly deals with ways to support teams of systems developers to work effectively (Curtis, et. al. 1988). Computer Scientists, in this view, would remove themselves from addressing organizational and human behavior, in the same way that molecular biologists are removed from professionally commenting on the practices of cardiologists and obstetricians. CTF argues that this view would be self-defeating. But it would be internally consistent and have a distinctive integrity. In contrast, CS faculty are often reluctant to wholly embrace Organizational Informatics. But some CS subfields, such as software engineering, depend upon organizational analysis (Curtis, et. al., 1988). Further, CS faculty do little to advertise the distinctive limitations in the analytical skills of our programs' graduates. Part of the dilemma develops because many CS faculty are ambivalent about systematic studies of human behavior. Applied mathematics and other modes of inquiry which seem to yield concise, crisp and concrete results are often the most cherished. As a consequence, those who conduct behaviorally oriented research in CS departments are often inappropriately marginalized. Their students and the discipline suffers as a result. Between 1986 and 1989, the total number of BS and MS CS degrees awarded annually in the US declined from about 50,000 to approximately 40,000. The number of students majoring in CS rapidly declined at a time when computerization was becoming widespread in many fields. A significant fraction of the decline can be attributed to many students finding CS programs insular and indifferent to many exciting forms of computerization. The decline of military R&D in the U.S. can amplify these trends or stimulate a more cosmopolitan view in CS departments. The decline in military R&D is shifting the job market for new CS graduates towards a markedly more civilian orientation. This shift, along with the trend towards computing distributed into diverse work groups, is leading to more job opportunities for people with CS education who know Organizational Informatics. The situation of CS departments has some parallels with Statistics departments. Statistics are widely used and taught in many academic disciplines. But Statistics departments have often maintained a monkish isolation from "applications." Consequently, the application of statistics thrives while Statistics departments have few students and modest resources. Might the status of Statistics indicate a future possibility for an insular approach to CS? The best Organizational Informatics research in North America is conducted by faculty in the Information Systems departments in business schools and by scattered social scientists (cf. Boland and Hirschheim, 1987; Galegher, Kraut and Egido, 1990; Cotterman and Senn, 1992; Sproull and Kiesler, 1991). But Computer Scientists cannot effectively delegate the research and teaching of Organizational Informatics to business Schools or social science departments. Like Computer Scientists, faculty in these other disciplines prefer to focus on their own self-defined issues. Computer Scientists are much more likely to ask questions with attention to fine grained technological nuances that influence designs. For example, the professional discussions of computer risks have been best developed through activities sponsored by the ACM's Special Interest Group on Software (SIGSOFT). They are outside the purview of business school faculty and, at best, only a few social scientists are interested in them. Generally, technology plays a minor role in social science theorizing. And when social scientists study technologies, they see a world of possibilities: energy technologies, transportation technologies, communication technologies (including television), medicinal drugs and devices, and so on. They see little reason to give computer-related information technologies a privileged role within this cornucopia. As a consequence, the few social scientists who take a keen interest in studying computerization are unfortunately placed in marginal positions within their own disciplines. Often they must link their studies to mainstream concerns as defined by the tastemakers of their own fields, and the resulting publications appear irrelevant to Computer Scientists. Further, faculty in these other disciplines are not organized to effectively teach tens of thousands of CS students, students who are steeped in technology and usually very naive about organizations, about systems development and use in organizations. In North America there is no well developed institutional arrangement for educating students who can effectively take leadership roles in conceptualizing and developing complex organizational computing projects (Lewis, 1989). CTF is permeated with interesting claims about the social value of recent and emerging computer-based technologies. While many of these observations should rest on an empirically grounded scientific footing, Computer Scientists have deprived themselves of access to such research. For example, the discussion of systems risks in the ACM rests on a large and varied collection of examples and anecdotes. But there is no significant research program to help better understand the conditions under which organizations are more likely to develop systems using the best risk-reducing practices. There is an interesting body of professional lore, but little scholarship to ground it (See Appendix). Computer Scientists have virtually no scholarship to utilize in understanding when high performance networks, like the National Research and Education Network, will catalyze social value proportional to their costs. Consequently, many of the "obvious" claims about the value of various computing technologies that we Computer Scientists make are more akin to the lore of home remedies for curing illness. Some are valid, others are unfounded speculation. More seriously, the theoretical bases for recommending home medical remedies and new computer technologies can not advance without having sound research programs. WHAT IS NEEDED CTF sets the stage for developing Organizational Informatics as a strong subfield within Computer Science. CTF bases the expansion of the discipline on a rich array of applications in which many of the effective technologies must be conceived in relationship to plausible uses in order provide attractive social value for multi-billion dollar public investments. The CS community needs an institutionalized research capability to produce a reliable body of knowledge about the usability and value of computerized systems and the conditions under which computer systems improve organizational performance. In Western Europe there are research projects about Organizational Informatics in a few Computer Science departments and research funding through the EEC's Espirit program (Bubenko, 1992; Iivari, 1991; Kyng and Greenbaum, 1991). These new research and instructional programs in Western Europe give Organizational Informatics a significantly more effective place in CS education and research than it now has in North America. The CS community in the U.S. has 30 years of experience in institutionalizing research programs, especially through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation (NSF). There are many approaches, including establishing national centers, supporting individual investigator research grants, supporting short institutes to help train new investigators and supporting research workshops for ongoing research. All such programs aim to develop and sustain research fields with a combination of direct research funds, the education of future researchers, and the development of research infrastructure. They are all multimillion dollar efforts. Today, NSF devotes about $125K annually to Organizational Informatics as part of the Information Technology in Organizations program. This start is far short of the level of funding required to develop this field within CS. The North American CS curricula must also include opportunities for students to learn the most reliable knowledge about the social dimensions of systems development and use (Denning, 1992). These opportunities, formed as courses, can provide varied levels of sophistication. The most elementary courses introduce students to some of the key topics in Organizational Informatics and the limitations of Systems Rationalism as an organizing frame (for example, Dunlop and Kling, 1991a). More advanced courses focus on specific topics, such as those I have listed above. They teach about substantive problems and theoretical approaches for analyzing them. While many of these approaches are anchored in the sociological theory of organizations, CS students usually won't grasp the importance of the theories without numerous computing examples to work with [4]. They also have trouble grasping the character of computing in organizations without guided opportunities for observing and analyzing computerization in practice. Consequently, some courses should offer opportunities for studying issues of computerization in actual organizations. Fortunately, a few CS departments offer some courses in Organizational Informatics. In addition, some CS faculty who research and teach about human behavior in areas like Human- Computer Interaction and Software Engineering can help expand the range of research and instruction. Curricula would vary, but they should include diverse courses for students who seek basic exposure to Organizational Informatics and those seek more thorough instruction. Unfortunately, only a fraction of the CS departments in the US. have faculty who study and teach about computing and human behavior. While the study of Organizational Informatics builds upon both the traditional technological foundations of CS and the social sciences, the social sciences at most universities will not develop it as an effective foundational topic for CS. On specific campuses, CS faculty may be able to develop good instructional programs along with colleagues in social sciences or Schools of Management. But delegating this inquiry to some other discipline does not provide a national scale solution for CS. Other disciplines will not do our important work for us. Mathematics departments may be willing to teach graph theory for CS students, but the analysis of algorithms would be a much weaker field if it could only be carried out within Mathematics Departments. For similar reasons, it is time for academic Computer Science to embrace Organizational Informatics as a key area of research and instruction. NOTES [1] See Dunlop and Kling, 1991a for an accessible introduction to these debates. Economic statistics about national level productivity are inexact, and sometimes weak. Baily and Gordon (1988) examined the extent to which measurement problems account for the difficulties of seeing the positive computerization show up in the US national productivity statistics. They concluded that measurements were inexact, and very poor in some sectors like banking, measurement errors were not the primary cause of difficulties. [2] Organizational Informatics is a new term, and I have found that some people instantly like it while others are put off. I've experimented with alternative labels, like Organizational Computing, which has also resulted in strong and mixed reactions. Computing is a more common term than Informatics, but it's too narrow for some researchers. Informatics also can connote "information," which is an important part of this field. Sociological Computer Science would have the virtues of being a parallel construction of Mathematical Computer Science, but doesn't connote information either. I have not yet found a short distinctive label which characterizes the field and whose connotations are rapidly grasped by both outsiders and insiders. [3] Jacky's early study was based on published reports, while Leveson and Turner's more thorough study was based upon a significant body of original documents and interviews with some participants. [4] One hears similar concerns about teaching mathematics to CS students. CS students are much more motivated to learn graph theory, for example, when they learn those aspects which best illuminate issues of computation and when their teaching includes some good computing examples. REFERENCES Baily, Martin Neal and Robert J. Gordon. 1988. "The Productivity Slowdown, Measurement Issues, and the Explosion of Computer Power." Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2:347-431. Bentley, Richard, Tom Rodden, Peter Sawyer, Ian Sommerville, John Hughes, David Randall and Dan Shapiro. 1992. "Ethnographically Informed Systems Design for Air Traffic Control." Proc. Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Jon Turner and Robert Kraut (ed.) New York, ACM Press. Boland, Richard and Rudy Hirschhiem (Ed). 1987. Critical Issues in Information Systems, New York: John-Wiley. Bullen, Christine and John Bennett. 1991. Groupware in Practice: An Interpretation of Work Experience" in Dunlop and Kling 1991b. Bubenko, Janis. 1992. "On the Evolution of Information Systems Modeling: A Scandinavian Perspective." in Lyytinen and Puuronen, 1992. Cotterman, William and James Senn (Eds). 1992. Challenges and Strategies for Research in Systems Development. New York: John Wiley. Curtis, Bill, Herb Krasner and Niel Iscoe. 1988. "A Field Study of the Software Design Process for Large Systems," Communications. of the ACM. 31(11):1268-1287. Denning, Peter. 1991. "Computing, Applications, and Computational Science." Communications of the ACM. (October) 34(10):129-131. Denning, Peter. 1992. "Educating a New Engineer" Communications of the ACM. (December) 35(12):83-97 Dunlop, Charles and Rob Kling, 1991a. "Introduction to the Economic and Organizational Dimensions of Computerization." in Dunlop and Kling, 1991b. Dunlop, Charles and Rob Kling (Ed). 1991b. Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices. Boston: Academic Press. Ehn, Pelle. 1991. "The Art and Science of Designing Computer Artifacts." in Dunlop and Kling, 1991. Fish, Robert S., Robert E. Kraut, Robert W. Root, and Ronald E. Rice. "Video as a Technology for Informed Communication." Communications of the ACM,36(1)(January 1993):48-61. Galegher, Jolene, Robert Kraut, and Carmen Egido (Ed.) 1990. Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Intellectual Foundations of Cooperative Work. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Greif, Irene. ed. 1988. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings. San Mateo, Ca: Morgan Kaufman. Grudin, Jonathan. 1989. "Why Groupware Applications Fail: Problems in Design and Evaluation." Office: Technology and People. 4(3):245-264. Hartmanis, Juris and Herbert Lin (Eds). 1992. Computing the Future: A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering. Washington, DC. National Academy Press. [Briefly summarized in Communications of the ACM,35(11) November 1992] Hewitt, Carl. 1986. "Offices are Open Systems" ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems. 4(3)(July):271-287. Hughes, John A., David Randall, and Dan Shapiro. 1992. "Faltering from Ethnography to Design." Proc. Conference on Computer- Supported Cooperative Work, Jon Turner and Robert Kraut (ed.) New York, ACM Press. Iivari, J. 1991."A Paradigmatic Analysis of Contemporary Schools of IS Development." European J. Information Systems 1(4)(Dec): 249-272. Jacky, Jonathan. 1991. "Safety-Critical Computing: Hazards, Practices, Standards, and Regulation" in Dunlop and Kling 1991b. Jarvinen, Pertti. 1992. "On Research into the Individual and Computing Systems," in Lyytinen and Puuronen, 1992. King, John L. and Kenneth L. Kraemer. 1981. "Cost as a Social Impact of Telecommunications and Other Information Technologies." In Mitchell Moss (Ed.) Telecommunications and Productivity, New York: Addison-Wesley. Kling, Rob. 1987. "Defining the Boundaries of Computing Across Complex Organizations." Critical Issues in Information Systems. edited by Richard Boland and Rudy Hirschheim. London: John Wiley. Kling, Rob. 1992. "Behind the Terminal: The Critical Role of Computing Infrastructure In Effective Information Systems' Development and Use." Chapter 10 in Challenges and Strategies for Research in Systems Development. edited by William Cotterman and James Senn. Pp. 153-201. New York: John Wiley. Kling, Rob. 1993."Computing for Our Future in a Social World" Communications of the ACM, 36(2)(February) Kling, Rob and Charles Dunlop. 1993. "Controversies About Computerization and the Character of White Collar Worklife." The Information Society. 9(1) (Jan-Feb) Kling, Rob and Lisa Covi. 1993. Review of Connections by Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler. The Information Society, 9(1) (Jan-Feb, 1993). Kling, Rob, Isaac Scherson, and Jonathan Allen. 1992. "Massively Parallel Computing and Information Capitalism" in A New Era of Computing. W. Daniel Hillis and James Bailey (Ed.) Cambrdige, Ma: The MIT Press. Kling, Rob and Walt Scacchi. 1982. "The Web of Computing: Com- puting Technology as Social Organization", Advances in Computers. Vol. 21, Academic Press: New York. Kraemer, Kenneth .L., Dickhoven, Siegfried, Fallows-Tierney, Susan, and King, John L. 1985. Datawars: The Politics of Modeling in Federal Policymaking. New York: Columbia University Press. Kyng, Morton and Joan Greenbaum. 1991. Design at Work: Cooperative Work of Computer Systems. Hillsdale, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ladner, Sharyn and Hope Tillman. 1992. "How Special Librarians Really Use the Internet: Summary of Findings and Implications for the Library of the Future" Canadian Library Journal, 49(3), 211-216. Leveson, Nancy G. 1992. "High Pressure Steam Engines and Computer Software." Proc. International Conference on Software Engineering, Melbourne, Australia. (May). Leveson, Nancy G. and Clark S. Turner. 1992. "An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents." Technical Report #92-108. Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine. Lewis, Philip M. 1989. "Information Syste