Groupware : some issues and experience, C.A. Ellis, S.J. Gibbs, and G.L. Rein
Even though this paper was published long time ago, Jan 1991,
it offers term definitions, important issues, widely ranging perspectives, and Grove, one example of a groupware system.
I wanna remind myself of the definition of "Groupware" to be familiar with it.
Groupware : Computer-based systems that support groups of people engaged in a common task/goal and that provide an interface to a share environment. - to assist groups in communicating, in collaborating, and in coordinating their activities.
In the paper, there are several key elements for taxonomy of groupware systems: time-space, applications. Actually, in the application level, the message systems, multiuser editors, group decision support and systems and electronic meeting room, and computer conferencing are introduced.
Regarding the several perspectives, I'd like to focus on "Human-Computer Interaction" and "Artificial Intelligence". This is because as I experienced, these two points have been the main issues when I was working at the company and sort of problems to be solved, and because they belong to my research interests.
Let me make the concepts clear first.
- Human-Computer Interaction Perspective
: emphasis on the importance of user interface in computer systems.
interdisciplinary field that requires diverse skills and experts.
- Artificial Intelligence Perspective
: techniques and technologies for imbuing machines with human-like attributes.
(semi-)automatic user-machine interaction
I guess these two aspects have risen especially due to the fact that people, i.e. multi-users are looking for improved usability, robust system, intuitive interaction without knowing/following manuals. Moreover, the system called "intelligent"still has long way to go, that means it can provide one of the most significant contributions to groupware! I expect that the two perspectives above enable multi-users to feel proper and visible environment for collaboration with offering single user's local operations. In addition, coordination, namely "integration and harmonious adjustment of individual work efforts toward the accomplishment of larger goal", will be done successfully.. (probably... I'm just a beginner... so just my imagination..)
Instead of the usage and experience of GROVE, a real-time group text editor allowing simultaneous editing of private, shared, and public views of a document, let me take another example of a code review tool, called "Gerrit". It satisfies the requirements above, in other words, the tool is real-time system, simultaneous editing, and moreover, it's kind of state-of-the-art tool. Incidentally, I may remark that it's being used in the Google platform development, "Android", and that one of the merits is an open-source. I made the ppt about that myself and let me paste the slides below. This groupware system may be better to introduce rather than GROVE considering this present, the year of 2010.
Also, you can refer to the following links :
-About code review: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_review
- Source: http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source
- Mondrian video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc
- Google App Engine: http://code.google.com/appengine/
- Google Web Toolkit : http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/gettingstarted.html
- Live app: http://codereview.appspot.com
- Django: http://djangoproject.com
- Python: http://python.org
- Rietveld : http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/
- Gerrit : http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/
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