CSCW and Social Computing

Abstract

Research on IT support for collaborative work has a long history. Researchers have approached the topic from many directions using many perspectives. The field split into multiple subfields, each focused on different goals, and each with its own terminology. One subfield is Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). The origins of CSCW trace back to a workshop organized by Irene Greif and Paul Cashman in 1984, where researchers from different disciplines met to exchange ideas, share results, and to join forces to better understand how IT could be used to improve and enhance group outcomes. A variety of definitions for CSCW have flowered, but they converge to similar concepts: ‘‘In its most general form, CSCW examines the possibilities and effects of technological support for humans involved in collaborative group communication and work processes’’ (Bowers and Benford 1991, p. 5). By studying work processes, and by developing and testing tools to support them, numerous technologies and tools have been developed and tested, and groundbreaking insights into understanding the process of collaboration and the process of introducing tools for supporting communication and collaboration have been obtained. For example, the utility of coexistence and awareness for some kinds of cooperative work is now well understood, and technological support for those items have been prototyped, tested, and diffused into the field (Dourish and Belotti 1992; Koch and Gross 2006). The concept of coordination has been researched, and support for coordination is now ubiquitous in the workplace (Malone and Crowston 1992). A variety of models for understanding the role of communication have been advanced, e.g. the context-oriented communication model by Misch (2001) or the Cooperative Work Framework by Dix et al. (1993, pp. 465 f), and each provides valuable insights for practitioners and researcher. CSCW research also helped to promulgate useful methodological points-of-view and methods to the information sciences. CSCW researchers were leaders in the diffusion of ethnographic studies in the IS discipline, and contributed to the growing perspective that people are not just ‘‘end-users’’ of information systems, but are an integral part of these systems, and so should be active participants in the processes by which systems are designed and deployed (Brenner et al. 2014). A different stream of research, now called Group Support Systems (GSS), emerged in the early 1970s in response to the need for very large numbers of stakeholders to converge on a single, validated set of computer system requirements. Daniel Teichroew, Jay Nunamaker, and others PSL/PSA, a system where users would write their requirements in a structured-English format akin to Pseudcode, and then feed the requirements into an Prof. Dr. M. Koch (&) Cooperation Systems Center Munich, Bundeswehr University Munich, Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39, 85577 Neubiberg, Germany e-mail: michael.koch@unibw.de URL: http://www.kooperationssysteme.de