Groupware and social networks: will life ever be the same again?

Abstract

Over the past twenty years industry and academia have been working to develop computer systems to increase work group's productivity, commonly referred to as groupware. Groupware encompasses a broad spectrum of research and development including group support systems, computer-supported collaborative work, group decision support systems, and computer mediated collaboration. Applications arising out of these efforts included concurrent multi-user authoring systems, computer conferencing, integrated computer/video meeting systems, electronic voting, brainstorming, and workflow systems. The papers in this special issue are some of the best from over 100 papers submitted to the GROUP'97 conference sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Supporting Group Work. They represent work conducted by researchers on four continents from both industry and academia. As a group the authors present a blend of theory, practice, and technological innovation from the groupware research arena. This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to the area of groupware research and development. In it we explore the evolution of groupware and expose some of its effects on organizations and society.