Developing Web-based Collaborative Applications — Social and Technical Issues

Once limited to serving information and facilitating transactions, the World Wide Web is increasingly being used to support collaboration for work groups as well as non-work-related groups.

Our goal is to discuss the social and behavioral aspects of collaborative interactions and to describe how Web technologies can be used to build applications to support these. We will look at CSCW research and commercial collaborative applications to identify the necessary set of features. The tutorial will examine alternative implementations of awareness, social visualization, chat, and shared workspaces. We will highlight ways to use the Web as a development platform, and compare their suitability for implementing collaborative applications.

At the end of the tutorial, participants will be aware of the elements to consider in Web-based collaborative applications and will be able to use Web technologies to build such applications.

Audience: This intermediate-level tutorial is intended for researchers, designers, and developers working in CSCW or Web applications to explore, design and build Web-based collaborative applications. In particular, this tutorial is of relevance to individuals interested in understanding issues related to social as well as technical elements needed in collaborative applications.

Instructors: Alison Lee, Andreas Girgensohn, and Catalina Danis have different backgrounds in computer science, psychology, and human-computer interaction. They have developed tools and methodologies to support distributed work groups. In the last six years, much of this development work has been carried out using Web technologies. They have presented papers and tutorials at HCI-related and CSCW-related conferences.

Length: One-day conference course or three-day extension course.

Note: This version of the tutorial is a substantially revised version from previous offering. We added Catalina Danis to our instructor team for this new offering.

Last Offering: Interact 2001 — Eighth IFIP TC.13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.

Previous Offerings:
CSCW 2000 — ACM 2000 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
Interact '99 Seventh IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.
Winter '99 UCLA Extension: Engineering & Computer Science.
CSCW'98 — The 1998 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.
CHI'98 — ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
GROUP'97 — International Conference on Supporting Group Work.
CHI'97 — ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
WWW6 — The Sixth International World Wide Web Conference.
CSCW'96 — The 1996 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.
KBSE'96 — 11th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference.