The following workshop is offered at GROUP'97. There is a registration fee to attend the workshop which includes lunch and refreshments. Please see also the requirements for participation at the workshop which is described below.
Full
Day Workshop
Tailorable
Groupware: Issues, Methods, and Architectures
Anders Mørch
University of Bergen
anders@ifi.uib.no
Oliver Stiemerling, Volker Wulf
University of Bonn
os@cs.uni-bonn.de, volker@cs.uni-bonn.de
Aims and Objective
The goal of this workshop is to bring together people from academia and industry who share an interest in groupware systems from the point of view of tailoring them, and who wish to participate in ongoing discussions with the aim of broadening the scope and deepening the understanding of some key issues in this area.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together wide ranging views dealing with all aspects of end user development of groupware systems. The result will be a collection of position papers with subsequent discussions that will be compiled by the workshop organizers.
Theme
Tailorability is widely assumed to be a key requirement for the design of groupware systems. We define tailorability as the activity of modifying an application within the context of its use. Tailoring is therefore distinguished from both use and development (Henderson and Kyng 1991, Wulf and Rohde 1995). In tailorable applications, it is convenient to distinguish between ordinary functions and tailoring functions.
Tailoring functions allow one to modify the way in which ordinary functions are executed by changing the different aspects of a system’s functionality. For instance, Bentley and Dourish (1995) distinguish between user interface features and deeper system behavior. Oppermann and Simm (1994) distinguish between functionality and interface, and Mørch (1995) identifies three kinds of tailoring activities: customization, integration, and extension, each addressing a different aspect of a system.
By interacting with the tailoring subsystem of an application the user can modify different aspects of a system’s interface. This can be accomplished in various ways, and one way proposed by Henderson and Kyng (1991) is to distinguish between three levels of tailoring activities:
Approaches to tailoring at the level of altering the artifact often
lack a high-level interface, hence preventing ordinary users from particpating
(MacLean et al. 1990, Malone et al. 1992, Kaplan et al. 1992). We argue
that it is important to allow ordinary users to tailor a system’s functionality
because the demands for changing a system are frequent and it is costly
to develop new systems from scratch. If one wants to offer ordinary users
a more tailorable system the following issues need to be addressed:
Participation in the workshop requires an up-front submission of a position paper, which describes work in progress, work that is near completion, or work that has been completed. Position papers should be submitted in electronic form to one of the workshop organizers. The length of position paper should be at least 3 pages, with a maximum of 10 pages. Please email you submission in electronic form to Anders Morch (anders@ifi.uib.no) until October 10, 1997.
Selection of participants will be based on the written submission with regards to its relevance to the workshop theme as well as the originality and depth of the submission and the author’s previous work in the area. Another criteria will be the diversity of the proposed groupware systems and the differences in the approaches to tailorability suggested (including opponents of tailorable systems) to include a wide range of perspectives.
All position papers will be distributed in advance of the workshop to all participants. The workshop organizers are in process of contacting interested journals, in the areas of HCI and CSCW, regarding editing a special issue on tailorable groupware, which will be based on the papers presented at the workshop.
About the organizers
Anders Mørch is an assistant professor in the Department
of Information Science at the University of Bergen where he teaches and
conducts research in the areas of participatory design, human-computer
interaction, and end-user computing. Mørch recently completed a
Ph.D in Informatics at the University of Oslo (1997), and has an M.S degree
in Computer Science from the University of Colorado (1988). He has spent
three years working in industry as a Member of Technical Staff at NYNEX
Science & Technology Center in New York (1989-1992).
Oliver Stiemerling works as a researcher in the Department
of Computer Science at the University of Bonn. From 1992 to 1994 he studied
computer science at the University of Bonn. From 1994 to 1995 he participated
in the ERASMUS program and studied computer science and business at the
University of Warwick in Great Britain. In 1996 he received his diploma
degree from the University of Bonn. Since 1997 he works in the POLITeam
Projekt at the University of Bonn. His main research interest lie in the
area of CSCW, component architectures, design for change and access control.
Volker Wulf works as a researcher in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Bonn and teaches as a visiting professor at
the Institute of Computers and Society at the University of Freiburg. In
1989, he received his diploma in computer science and in 1990, he got his
diploma in business administration at the Aachen Institute of Technology.
1996 he got his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Dortmund.
Since 1991, he is working on different research projects in the field of
CSCW. His research interests lie primarily in the area of privacy, human-computer
interaction, groupware, and the implications of organizational theory on
groupware design.
Related References