Abstract
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an established subset of the field of Human Computer Interaction that deals with the how people use computing technology to enhance group interaction and collaboration. Mobile CSCW has emerged as a result of the progression from personal desktop computing to the mobile device platforms that are ubiquitous today.
 CSCW aims to not only connect people and facilitate communication through using computers; it aims to provide conceptual models coupled with technology to manage, mediate, and assist collaborative processes. Mobile CSCW research looks to fulfil these aims through the adoption of mobile technology and consideration for the mobile user. Facilitating collaboration using mobile devices brings new challenges. Some of these challenges are inherent to the nature of the device hardware, while others focus on the understanding of how to engineer software to maximize effectiveness for the end-users. This paper reviews seminal and state-of-the-art cooperative software applications and development frameworks, and their support for mobile devices.
Highlights
The term groupware was first coined in the early 1980s by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz, and the emerging Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community adopted this rubric to try and describe computer applications to support collaboration1
Jonathan Grudin reviewed the different approaches to the research field in his 1994 IEEE Computer magazine article, ‘Computer Supported Cooperative Work: History and Focus’, and made the following observation of the challenges of the day: “If we think of CSCW as an emerging field or common enterprise, we may be frustrated by this mosaic of different pieces, the frequent misunderstandings, and the lack of intellectual coherence
What Grudin highlighted was that despite the consensus on what CSCW research broadly entails, the approaches to the research vary between academia and business; between researchers rooted in different disciplines, and
Summary
The term groupware (a fusion of the words ‘group’ and ‘software’) was first coined in the early 1980s by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz, and the emerging Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community adopted this rubric to try and describe computer applications to support collaboration. An ecological analysis in [2] of the research field itself had shown that there has been a trend showing a high churn rate of and slight decline in number of authors contributing to CSCW research literature since the end of the 1980s They further conclude that CSCW’s independence from the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) may rely heavily on a small subset of established researchers. From their analysis they propose that perhaps the high churn exhibited may be due to a lack of consensus on core questions in CSCW and limited room for new research directions. The rest of this paper goes on to discuss and define Mobile CSCW, review a number of groupware applications and development frameworks, and discuss motivations for further research in the development of interactive, mobile, cooperative software
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