Answer Garden: a tool for growing organizational memory
COCS '90 Proceedings of the ACM SIGOIS and IEEE CS TC-OA conference on Office information systems
The integration of distributed knowledge in collaborative medical diagnosis
Intellectual teamwork
Tcl and the Tk toolkit
Augmenting the organizational memory: a field study of answer garden
CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Answer garden: a tool for growing organizational memory
Answer garden: a tool for growing organizational memory
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Many user communities have a problem of delivering help and general assistance. Unfortunately, the user is often left to sift through reams of documentation, find his way through mail archives, or pursue answers through trial and error. Normally, one attempts to examine the documentation or other help sources, and then wanders out into a hallway in search of friendly colleagues.The problem becomes acute, however, in distributed communities. I take for my example the astrophysics community, although this problem exists in most scientific communities. In the astrophysics community, the users may be spread across the world, they may work in isolation, and they may have need of relatively specialized help. What I would like is to build is a surrogate for this hallway talk. Such a solution must avoid the broadcast problem of flooding everyone's electronic mail basket with thousands of questions. Instead, this research proposes building a system to narrow-cast a question to the appropriate others, whether those others are experts or colleagues.My thesis work consisted of building a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work system called Answer Garden [1] [4]. Answer Garden allows organizations to develop databases of commonly asked questions that grow "organically" as new questions arise and are answered. Answer Garden 2, the current project, attempts to solve the problems encountered in field studies of the original system [2]. A new architecture provides a customizable and adaptable set of software components that allow a variety of organizational and informational configurations.In order to construct Answer Garden 2, however, it has been necessary to develop an underlying communications infrastructure called the Cafe ConstructionKit. Cafe has turned out to be a generalized and quite useful system in its own right.