Families must continually organize and plan to coordinate everyday life. To help address family coordination challenges, we present our research efforts on LINC: an inkable family calendar designed for the kitchen. Our work outlines key implications for digital family calendars and family coordination systems in general.

In this paper, we develop a technique to measure how congruent the actual organizational communication channels are relative to the coordination requirement imposed by the dependencies among tasks and we discuss its practical implications for the design of collaborative and awareness tools.

We present a broad and deep look at the use of a collaboration tool in the intelligence community. Through an experimental program, Groove was provided to a number of intelligence analysts starting in the spring of 2002. We present our analysis of Groove uses from 2002 to March, 2005.

This paper will review a research program examining the conditions under which people contribute to online groups and how these contributions influence the groups' success. The research is both descriptive, predicting what makes existing groups successful, and prescriptive, designing interventions to improve the success of online groups.

The social nature of design necessitates tools and processes that foster communication among team members. Our approach enables collaboration among project stakeholders through our design and knowledge management environment, enabling efficient development of usable systems. Based on an initial study, we elaborate on key issues and future directions.

We are investigating 'activity awareness' ' longer-term and broader-scope awareness phenomena entrained by sharing activity with others. In this paper, we review a "framework" for activity awareness (based on a paper in press in IwC) and extend the concept to examine groups constituted within broader community contexts, including members' awareness of other groups and of groups' relationship(s) to one's own group.

We are developing a theory of remote collaboration based on the literature and on findings from our own investigations. The theory breaks the factors leading to success into five categories. This extended abstract describes these factors, provides examples of each, and briefly discusses the mechanisms we believe underlie them.

In this paper, we explain how our research on applications for chronic care domain problems has uncovered challenges and opportunities in the design and development of collaborative applications. Specifically, we discuss projects focused on care of the elderly, children with special needs, and individuals with diabetes.

Complex design projects cannot be accomplished by single persons due to the limitations of the individual, unaided human mind. They provide rich settings for studying collaboration and coordination. Based on an empirically grounded understanding, we have developed socio-technical environments supporting social creativity and meta-design in different dimensions and for different kinds of communities.

A software development organization records a tremendous amount of knowledge about the software implementation, in disparate media ' specifications, source code comments, email discussions, etc. This information is underutilized when a developer is trying to understand unfamiliar source code. We propose using established UI techniques to give ready access to this information based on a graph of software artifacts encoding relationships drawn from a variety of sources.

Consolidarity explores what meaningful patterns of social commonality can be discovered among consolidated file storage in an organizational context. The project explores what can be learned by comparing files stored among individuals in an organization. Discovering specific document files, applications, developer libraries or other objects in common may suggest areas of shared interest or experience in using a resource that could be useful to share within an organization. This approach raises many privacy concerns, which would need to be addressed in the research.

This paper describes an ethnographically-based study of one disease management program in a major medical system. This medical program aims to help patients with managing and monitoring their depression. Our focus in this paper is to consider some of the everyday work involved in maintaining, managing, and extending an extremely complex environment , whether those design activities be organizational, social, or technical. The everyday work involved will be particularly interesting as second and third-generation CSCW systems become embedded in increasingly complex environments of systems, practices, and organizations.

In this paper we describe a social bookmarking service de-signed for a large enterprise. We discuss design principles addressing online identity, privacy, information discovery (including search and pivot browsing), and service extensi-bility based on a web-friendly architectural style. In addi-tion we describe the key design features of our implementa-tion. We provide the results of an eight week field trial of this enterprise social bookmarking service, including a de-scription of user activities, based on log file analysis. We share the results of a user survey focused on the benefits of the service. The feedback from the user trial, comprising survey results, log file analysis and informal communica-tions, is quite positive and suggests several promising en-hancements to the service. Finally, we discuss potential extension and integration of social bookmarking services with other corporate collaborative applications.

Asian cultures differ from Western ones along dimensions affecting computer-mediated communication (CMC). We describe two experiments and a survey showing that visual cues are more important in Asian than Western CMC and that cross-cultural collaborations are less enjoyable than same-culture ones. We present designs for tools to facilitate cross-cultural communication.

We study students doing mathematics collaboratively in online chat environments. We describe the methods that they develop to conduct their interactions. These methods define a shared set of ways to make sense together, and define the collaborative experience for the small groups that develop and adopt them.

Many visions of computer-based coordination assume that the infrastructure can be readily configured by its users. However, computers leave managed infrastructure settings, this is changing. In this paper, we describe how bringing HCI principles to the design of infrastructure technologies such as networking and security is essential to facilitate coordination.

In this paper, we examine the effect of culture, media and task on people's trust behavior and trust perception in three different cultural pairs: American-American (AA), Chinese-Chinese(CC), and American-Chinese (AC) on doing two different tasks: negotiation task and brainstorming task. Our primary data showed that in negotiation task CC pairs performed better in video condition than in IM (instant messaging) condition while there was no such difference for AA pairs. In addition, it took CC pairs longer time to reach negotiation agreement, but CC pairs perceived lower level of trust than AA pairs.

Activity-centric collaboration involves shared work, structured in ways that facilitate both private and shared actions. This paper reports a participatory analysis of complex shared activities at each of four sites. Despite the highly collaborative nature of the work, informants reported a complex mix of shared and unshared objects and tasks. These patterns of selective sharing in shared activities help to inform conceptualizations of coordination and articulation, and suggest the need for local structures in environments to support end-users in co-constructing and co-conducting shared activities.

The trend towards staffing projects globally provides more options for staffing and cost structures. But there can be hidden costs in coordinating work across multiple locations, time zones and cultures. We studied three successful global software development teams to understand how they used their informal networks to overcome the challenges.

The paper presents a synthesis on two field trials performed to evaluate DigiDress and Scent, social proximity applications (SPAs) enabling interaction with nearby users. A four-stage Onion Model is introduced, in which the user proceeds through layers of social interaction. The model can be used to inspire the design of electronic products that facilitate proximity-based social interaction.

In support of inter-personal communication over IM we present statistical models (derived from data associated with over 90,000 real messages) that can predict a user's responsiveness to messages initiating new sessions, with accuracy as high as 88%. These models can be used, for example, for providing enhanced awareness or in services aimed at finding potential communicators.

We summarized recent work in understanding models of how users socially foraging with diverse hints. One way to bridge between different communities of users is to diversify their information sources. We have been examining the possibility of using a collaborative search engine to achieve this effect.

We evaluated the efficacy of CACHE, a collaborative system that supports intelligence analysis in a distributed team of analysts. In this talk we review relevant literature, describe the CACHE system, the task and the laboratory procedure, and present our results and their implications for theory, design, and methodology in CSCW.

We report on an ethnographic study of twelve global software development teams, including 189 on-site interviews and twelve weeks of observations. We discuss our preliminary finding that face-to-face meetings and site visits have effects that endure beyond the event itself, specifically that they facilitate future information sharing on these teams.

In many fields, researchers have juxtaposed the concepts of formal and informal to generate new ideas about interaction and design The general area of coordination has been ripe with such proposals (c.f. survey by Nutt, 1996), but these have not made the transition into the discipline of software development. There, formal tools and approaches still dominate. We indeed see a need for formal process support, but wish to augment them with informal mechanisms inspired by research on awareness (Heath, Luff, 1992; Dourish, Bellotti, 1992; Lee, Girgensohn, 2002). We introduce a conceptual framework termed continuous coordination to frame the approach. We have developed software tools that begin to illustrate this approach and have received positive feedback from developers. However, many open questions remain.

SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, filters and sorts email based on the user's past history with an email correspondent. We report on a 4 week field study (N=574), and describe ways that users used it. We present a scale of email overflow to assess users' experience with email.

We created a Web site for sharing visually pleasing photo collages reminiscent of stained glass windows. The collages can be used as personalized greeting cards. We are about to launch a new public version that supports the collaborative creation of collages. We expect to have usage data after the holiday season.

We present data from the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) '03 mission to unpack the factors that produce a speed-up of group performance. Analyses, based on a broad set of data collected (video, ethnographic observation, mission data files, etc.), inform the design of tools to support collaborative problem solving and decision-making.

The goal of this research is to elucidate the ways shared visual space supports group communication and performance. This paper presents an overview of studies that decompose the features of shared visual space, a methodology for assessing the sequential structure of how visible actions augment spoken discourse, and the development of a computational model of collaborative referring behavior that accounts for shared visual information.

The Virtual Math Teams project studies how students do mathematics collaboratively in online chat. By employing conversation analysis and coding, we investigate how groups use specific affordances of chat systems to organize interaction and to address common tasks by co-constructing, making sense of, and manipulating math objects.

Awareness is crucial for fostering communication, collaboration and coordination in groupware applications. In my PhD thesis, I propose that the type of awareness information needed highly depends on the user's current situation and establish design principles for situated awareness in collaborative learning scenarios which will be evaluated in a study.

An empirical study is proposed to investigate impacts of gender and culture on end-user programming. The study results will help verify whether there are culture effects and interaction effects between gender and culture in the design of software features that inhibit effective end-user programming.

Human computer communication is sometimes difficult due to lack of emotion and dialogue diversification. Many research projects target the development of technology to support people with cognitive disabilities. However, repetitive, and emotionless communication may challenge any chances of success. In this paper, we outline a plan of research that utilizes a case-based method that relies on the audience's emotional context to recommend a communication strategy that is both diverse and embedded with relevant motivational aspects.

Distributed meetings are increasingly common, but they are often less effective than face-to-face meetings. This paper describes the user research behind the Sun LabsTM Meeting Suite, summarizes the core features, and describes a set of new features including support for high-fidelity audio and confidential meetings.

Scientific collaboration is characterized by meaningful endeavors that are typically long-term and are distributed across time and resources. Sustaining and enhancing creative flow over weeks or months is a challenge. In this paper, I explore the premise that activity awareness through notification systems can enhance scientific creativity.

How does the design of the technologies we use affect the nature of the knowledge we produce in collaborative settings? In what ways do computational tools and social organization not only shape our practices, but also demand different ways of understanding the world? My research examines the tools that...

A field study of civic collaborations in Colorado found a success rate four times higher than the national average. An agent-based model shows that long-term outcomes depend on initial trust, commitment, and rate of growth. Field data suggests successful outcomes are tied to participation in a lengthy planning process.

When trying to accomplish a task using multiple devices, users are forced to interrupt their tasks, move their data and information back and forth among the various platforms manually, and then resume them on another device. We refer to this break from the task at hand as a task disconnect. Our objective is to study how software can bridge this task disconnect, enabling users to seamlessly transition their tasks from one device to another. We call the user interfaces to such software systems, continuous user interfaces.

Researchers hypothesized that collaboratories widely adopted in scientific work can benefit scientists from developing countries. However, there has been no research that systematically collects data to confirm or disconfirms this. This study examines how collaboratories benefit scientists from developing countries and the social, political, and technical factors that influence their participation in collaboratories

I present preliminary results from a field study of an R&D lab where I investigated how workers form and use impressions of coworkers. The findings suggest that impressions emerge out of activities that workers engage in and that artifacts act as a conduit for what workers learn about each other.

The public has always played an important, active role in the aftermath of a disaster; it is the local citizens who are the true 'first responders.' The availability of information communication technology (ICT) in the hands of ordinary people is expanding the role of the public as participants in disaster recovery in crucial ways. This research project focuses on web-based forms of messaging in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The goal of this work is to support interpersonal communication over IM through modeling of IM interaction in the context in which it takes place: Predictions and observations of responsiveness to IM (when), of interpersonal relationships (who), and of IM discourse to support automatic analysis of topic and content (what).

Three separate, influential threads in study of sensemaking are reconciled. The first two are different theories and the last thread is design of sensemaking support tools. Integrated, these form a strong foundation for researchers, tool-designers and ultimately sensemakers themselves. Understanding the role of people-people interaction helps us tie these threads.

This paper presents a proposal for an experimental study of interactivity effects in electronically mediated feedback communication. Conversational interactivity is expected to be lower when pairs of subjects are using mixed communication media. Performance feedback is expected to be less successful when interactivity is reduced, especially when the properties of the communication environment violate the norms of feedback communication.

Double-loop learning is characterized as a radical reformulation of an organization's existing norms and values during the problem solving process. In this paper I develop a framework that is derived from the premise that both bonding and bridging forms of social capital differentially enable and converge to facilitate double-loop learning.

In product design, collaboration is structured around artifacts. Prototypes are used to anchor team discussion, to test ideas with prospective users, and to aid client communication. For the growing area of information appliances, tools that enable design generalists to rapidly produce functional prototypes are still lacking. Based on fieldwork with product designers, we are creating d.tools, a system enabling non-programmers to prototype the bits and the atoms of physical user interfaces in concert.

In this paper we describe a social bookmarking service de-signed for a large enterprise. We discuss design principles addressing online identity, privacy, information discovery (including search and pivot browsing), and service extensi-bility based on a web-friendly architectural style. In addi-tion we describe the key design features of our implementa-tion. We provide the results of an eight week field trial of this enterprise social bookmarking service, including a de-scription of user activities, based on log file analysis. We share the results of a user survey focused on the benefits of the service. The feedback from the user trial, comprising survey results, log file analysis and informal communica-tions, is quite positive and suggests several promising en-hancements to the service. Finally, we discuss potential extension and integration of social bookmarking services with other corporate collaborative applications.

Agile software development has largely ignored or been unable to address usability. This work presents a development process based on extreme programming'from agile software development, and scenario-based design'from usability engineering. This approach will allow developers in both fields to communicate and work together to efficiently design usable systems.

Interruptions are a costly, but necessary, aspect of communication in the workplace. In this paper, we present a model of the decision to initiate or respond to communication. We discuss the utility of two coordination mechanisms for minimizing informal communication imbalance: control of message timing and visibility of task status.

A technology system was deployed by a distributed design team to support ad hoc P2P communications between sites. A two-mode social network analysis demonstrates the evolution of the use of this system by design team members to support communications similar to that found in similar-but-collocated design work.

Current CM systems promote isolation of individual development activities that often results in conflicting changes. Palant'r is a CM-workspace-awareness tool that overcomes this isolation by providing developers with insight into ongoing changes. We enable a better understanding of where Palant'r fits into the larger context of current coordination technologies through the Coordination Pyramid framework.

This research focuses on developing socially appropriate ways to archive life experiences during unexpected, unstructured, and informal situations. This work involves three phases: formative studies, design and development of a technical architecture for capture and access in these settings coupled with creation of applications; and evaluation of this solution.

This paper reports an ongoing study on cross-cultural collaboration through board-based collaborative systems. Twenty-one pairs performed collaborative design tasks either face-to-face or remotely. We examine the impact of culture (American-American vs. American-Chinese), mode of communication, and system on several measures of common ground, cognitive consensus building, perceived performance, and satisfaction.