Computer Support for Real Time Collaborative Work Saul Greenberg and Ernest Chang Advanced Technologies Alberta Research Council 6815 8 St NE Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2E 7H7 phone: (403) 297-2674 email: saul@noah.arc.cdn Abstract—A large portion of an office worker’s time involves real time collaboration with fellow associates. Many traditional tools assist this process, such as telephones, meeting rooms, specialized media such as whiteboards, and so on. This paper is concerned with the potential of the computer as a tool to further enhance the group work process through direct support of real time communication needs and the specific collaboration requirements of the group. General computer support for four styles of real-time interactions are distinguished and surveyed: 1) face to face meetings; 2) remote conferencing; 3) casual real time interaction; and 4) multi-user applications. Each topic is introduced, motivations discussed, and the key technical systems and related research described. 1 Introduction Although computers are now familiar tools used by people to pursue their own individual tasks, they have not, until recently, been exploited to assist people working together. Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is a new multi-disciplinary research field exploring the potential of the computer to support group work. CSCW acts as an umbrella to a variety of specializations including electronic mail, asynchronous conferencing, bulletin boards, group decision support systems, collaborative authoring, group knowledge elicitation, shared workspaces, and so on. This document will focus only on those CSCW systems that support real time communication and collaboration between people. General computer support for four styles of real-time interactions are distinguished and surveyed: 1) face to face meetings; 2) remote conferencing; 3) casual real time interaction; and 4) multi-user applications. The paper begins with a discussion of face-to-face formal/semi-formal meetings, where all participants are located in the same meeting room and have ready access to the same physical materials. Formal meetings are typically scheduled, are goal-oriented, have invited participants, and often involve an organizer or chairperson. The discussion of computer support revolves around the computer as both a facilitator to the meeting and as an extended media tool. The subsequent section considers remote conferencing, where some or all attendees at a real-time meeting are located at different sites. The role of technology in remote conferencing emphasises bringing people and their materials together in a way that allows participants to orchestrate the conversation as effectively as they do in face-to-face meetings, and to share their otherwise inaccessible materials over distance. The discussion continues on the theme of computer- support for casual real-time interactions. Spontaneous unplanned meetings are often crucial for bringing together people for collaborations, yet the opportunity for accidental encounters has an exponential decay with distance. Computer mediation is explored as a way of bringing distance-separated people into contact through frequent, unplanned, high-quality, and real-time interactions. While the above distinctions derive from social interaction, another approach stems from multi-user applications. These are those problem-specific programs that support the distributed and often persistent interactions of a group of persons who work together through the roles intrinsic to the task at hand. These applications tend to be structured less as meetings and more as integrations of distinct roles in large endeavours, such as the teamwork of captain, navigator, pilot and engineer on a ship. The paper closes with a list of the relevant books, journals, and technical conferences related to computer supported cooperative work. Cite as: Greenberg, S. and Chang, E. (1990) “Computer support for real time collaborative work.” Congressus Numerantium, 75, pp. 247-262, June. First published in Proceedings of the Conference on Numerical Mathematics and Computing, Sept 28-30, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1989