Social, individual and technological issues for groupware calendar systems

• Authors: Leysia Palen
• Venue: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Year: 1999

Designing and deploying groupware is difficult. Groupwareevaluation and design are often approached from a singleperspective, with a technologically-, individually-, orsocially-centered focus. A study of Groupware Calendar Systems(GCSs) highlights the need for a synthesis of these multipleperspectives to fully understand the adoption challenges thesesystems face. First, GCSs often replace existing calendarartifacts, which can impact users calendaring habits and in turninfluence technology adoption decisions. Second, electroniccalendars have the potential to easily share contextualizedinformation publicly over the computer network, creatingopportunities for peer judgment about time allocation and raisingconcerns about privacy regulation. However, this situation may alsosupport coordination by allowing others to make useful inferencesabout ones schedule. Third, the technology and the socialenvironment are in a reciprocal, co-evolutionary relationship: theuse context is affected by the constraints and affordances of thetechnology, and the technology also co-adapts to the environment inimportant ways. Finally, GCSs, despite being below the horizon ofeveryday notice, can affect the nature of temporal coordinationbeyond the expected meeting scheduling practice.