This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is carefully poised between informal, ad hoc, easy-to-initiate collaborative tools, vs. more formal, structured, and highoverhead collaborative applications. Our approach focuses on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared objects with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed first look at data from the first 100 days of usage by 20 researchers and 13 interns, who both confirmed our hypotheses and surprised us by reinventing the technology in several ways.
By: Michael J. Muller, Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, Eric Wilcox, and David R. Millen
Published in: RC23130 in 2004
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