Between Friends: Support of Workgroup Communications (2000)
article⁄Between Friends: Support of Workgroup Communications (2000)
abstract⁄The web offers both business and academic users potential benefits from online collaboration. Online education presents universities with a means of handling the ‘baby boom echo’ without expanding physical campuses Carnevale 2000. Business ’extranets’ allow greater coordination amongst team members on projects where the cast of players involves experts in different locations. Both involve substituting computermediated communications CMC for traditionally facetoface communications. Over the past several years, the author has deployed several of the available CMC technologies in support of small group interaction in academic and administrative settings. These technologies include email, video conferencing, web publication, web bulletin boards, web databases, mailing lists, and hybrid web BBSemail combinations. This paper reflects on aspects of embodied human interaction and the affordances of current CMC technology, identifying opportunities for both exploitation and additional development. One important but undersupported aspect of work group behavior is workspace awareness, or peripheral monitoring. The Compadres webbased system, which was developed to support workspace awareness among distributed workgroup members, is described. These findings are relevant to those seeking to create online communities virtual design studios, community groups, distributed governance organizations, and workgroups formed as parts of virtual offices.
