Taking the Work out of Workflow: Mechanisms for Document-Centered Collaboration
Anthony LaMarca, W. Keith Edwards, Paul Dourish, John Lamping, Ian Smith, Jim Thornton · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2005
There are two aspects to technical support for collaborative activity; support for content work and support for coordination. The design of CSCW systems must typically address both of these, combining them in a collaborative application. This approach, however, suffers from a variety of well-known problems, not least the compatibility between collaborative and single-user applications, working styles and practices. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach that makes coordination and collaborative functionality an aspect of the collaborative artifact rather than a collaborative application. We present an infrastructure and a series of application examples to illustrate the idea of document-centered collaboration, in which coordination and collaboration are separated from and independent of applications. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.