Summary Response Week 4: CSCW Problems

CPSC 601.25 Week 4 Response

Papers

In this response I will discuss two papers related to the failures of groupware and collaborative work systems and what causes these failures.

Great Potential

In the late 1980's the prevalence of decent network connections and the huge success of simple 'single user' applications seemed to set the stage for an explosion of groupware systems. Every aspect of work would be linked together by computers and work tasks would become mediated by company wide systems. These dreams were cut short by the realization that collaborative systems had a host of problems that single user systems did not. Problems emerged not from technical issues but social ones. Over time the CSCW research community absorbed these lessons, largely from other domains such as psychology and human-factors research.

Great Potential

But still good collaborative work systems still did not come into existence. A paper written by Ackerman suggests that such systems might never be possible, that the social issues involve collaborative work systems are just insurmountable. He details the difficulty which such systems as stemming from a couple of root causes, a lack of flexibility, nuance and ambiguity. That systems cannot be built to handle these causes because of the huge increase in complexity, cost and other factors. Faced which this Ackerman considers what reasonable raison d'etre still exists for CSCW research. While his assertion might be somewhat correct the paper soon gets lost of in the dizzying terminology of philosophy where Ackerman discusses "a science" rather then science itself. Rather then a deeper exploration about how to create systems which do better and better at dealing with fuzzy social issues, the paper gets lost in a discussion about 'a science of the artificial'. A better approach, away from the quagmires of fuzzy language would be to generalize further about these social difficulties are lay out the basic steps a future technology must meet to handle them.

Concrete Problems

A better approach to understanding groupware problems it the paper by Grundin. He explains some of the common ways that groupware fails and provides several clear examples of how and why these systems fail. The best example was the disparity between incentives with these systems. Unless the employer is willing to hire and fire (and provide incentives the old fashioned way) then designers must be prepared to offer some utility to all the people that use software. Unlike the earlier paper this suggests a clear task for the developers of this system, add more value for each user in a system. A common theme is that automatic decisions are often difficult to get right, and we can clearly recommend to designers to use them sparingly.

2012 Groupware

Since many of these papers are over 20 years old, we can look on them with years of experience. The suggestion that groupware was impossible because of a 'social-technology' barrier seems ... premature. Large companies have built voluntary organic systems that should qualify as groupware ... such a Facebook and Gmail and have made huge successes out of them. It should be clear that groupware is a challenging field but it should remain a field that attempts to solve problems for people, not a seperate 'science'.