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The multiple views of inter-organizational authoring

Published: 06 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

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 <b>not</b> 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.

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  • (2024)Workplace Aspects of Knowledge and Expertise Sharing Practices Supported by Augmented Reality Systems: Findings from a Design Case StudyComputer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)10.1007/s10606-024-09508-8Online publication date: 17-Dec-2024
  • (2021)CoCapture: Effectively Communicating UI Behaviors on Existing Websites by Demonstrating and RemixingProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445573(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2017)KoreroProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/31346691:CSCW(1-19)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2004
644 pages
ISBN:1581138105
DOI:10.1145/1031607
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 06 November 2004

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Author Tags

  1. clinical trials
  2. collaborative authoring
  3. field study
  4. medical informatics

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CSCW04
CSCW04: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 6 - 10, 2004
Illinois, Chicago, USA

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CSCW '04 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 176 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Workplace Aspects of Knowledge and Expertise Sharing Practices Supported by Augmented Reality Systems: Findings from a Design Case StudyComputer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)10.1007/s10606-024-09508-8Online publication date: 17-Dec-2024
  • (2021)CoCapture: Effectively Communicating UI Behaviors on Existing Websites by Demonstrating and RemixingProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445573(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2017)KoreroProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/31346691:CSCW(1-19)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
  • (2012)Supporting research collaboration through bi-level file synchronizationProceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/2389176.2389202(165-174)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2012
  • (2007)Community, consensus, coercion, controlProceedings of the 2007 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/1316624.1316648(167-176)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2007
  • (2007)CAWSCHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1240866.1241040(2555-2560)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2007
  • (2007)Participatory design of a collaborative clinical trial protocol writing systemInternational Journal of Medical Informatics10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2006.05.03576(S245-S251)Online publication date: Jun-2007

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