Low overhead, loosely coupled communication channels in collaboration

• Authors: Dorab Patel;Scott D. Kalter
• Venue: ECSCW'93 Proceedings of the third conference on European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
• Year: 1993

Communication and coupling are two central aspects of systems developed for computer-supported cooperative work. Synchronous communication usually implies tight coupling while asynchronous communication is often used with loose coupling. This paper explores the previously neglected role of loosely coupled channels in synchronous communication by providing some example channels and evaluating their tradeoff. Such loosely coupled channles efficiently meet specialized communication needs that often arise in spontaneous, short-lived collaborations. They can also augment existing channels in specific domians. These channels impose few requirements on their host applications and hence can be easily integrated into tools familiar to most users. Our implementation is built over an inter-application communication framework that provides flexible high-level communication abstractions for the rapid prototyping, implementing, and experimenting with these channels.