Abstract
CSCW systems are often designed and viewed from a technological point of view, where one is concerned with consistency, integrity and other properties. However, for many purposes, such global system properties are not relevant to the use of the system by users who are not concerned with the implementation, the state of the art of the technology, or the moment-to-moment state of remote systems of which they have no direct experience (except via the system itself). However, in CSCW we are, by definition, interested in systems from each user’s point of view, and this quite proper concern should be reflected in the technical system requirements.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
There are technical advantages for this, such as reducing the bandwidth needed for multimedia CSCW.
The authors have often been asked, ‘How does the Internet work?’ Here, the questioners don’t mean, ‘What can I do with it?’ but rather a low-level question like, ‘How do I make it work to do what I want to do?’ Our answer is, ‘If the Internet worked, you wouldn’t need to know the answer.’ When people ask how the Internet works, they are asking questions that, for a telephone network, simply do not arise.
The attentive reader will notice M appearing in definitions of properties in the text that follows. This may give the impression that the definitions are not functional; always, however, M is subscripted by the user, which is an explicit parameter of the property. (M, unsubscripted, can be taken as a constant.)
Since we have ρ at our disposal, we could make the domains of the system and the user non-overlapping, then 0 is trivially generalized in this way. Moreover, we might want the domains of every user to be distinct, and this is achieved by different ρ for each user. Hence Mu ⊕ Mv is a convenient (and correct) way to represent the joined models of two users.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag London Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thimbleby, H., Pullinger, D. (1996). Observations on Practically Perfect CSCW. In: Dix, A.J., Beale, R. (eds) Remote Cooperation: CSCW Issues for Mobile and Teleworkers. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1496-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1496-3_7
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76035-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-1496-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive