Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
How a group-editor changes the character of a design meeting as well as its outcome
CSCW '92 Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work
Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers
Communications of the ACM
Computer support for distributed collaborative writing: defining parameters of interaction
CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Communications of the ACM
Learning to write together using groupware
CHI '95 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Contact: support for distributed cooperative writing
ECSCW'95 Proceedings of the fourth conference on European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
Decision support tools for clinical trial design
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Community, consensus, coercion, control: cs*w or how policy mediates mass participation
Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work
Supporting research collaboration through bi-level file synchronization
Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Supporting group work
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Collaborative authoring is a common workplace task. Yet, despite improvements in word processors, communication software, and file sharing, many problems continue to plague co-authors. We conducted a qualitative study in a setting where participants are loosely connected, physically separated, and work together over a period of 4-9 months to author a complex technical document-a clinical trial protocol. Our study differs from most prior work in that the collaboration is longer-lived, and that the collaborators do not share equivalent status, background, nor domains of expertise. Our data demonstrates that the participants do not share the same view or representation of the authoring process, even though it has a long organizational history. Nonetheless, the participants can still coordinate their activity while maintaining only partially consistent representations of what they are doing. We contend that partial consistency in the participants' concept of the collaborative process is a feature for their asynchronous collaboration at a distance. Based on our findings we suggest a number of improvements for both tools and tool usage that have direct impact on support for collaborative authoring.