NordiCHI 2000 — Workshop 3

New cultures of writing together
Sharingexperiences of co-authoring with technologies

Sunday 22nd October 2000, Full day

Prospective participants are invited to submit position papers for the NordiCHI2000 Workshop focused on writing, collaboration and CSCW technologies.

The workshop is directed to researchers and professionals who are interested in the field of computer mediated collaborative writing.

The focus is on the slow development of the use of collaborative writing systems and on the human activities that CSCW systems affect when people write documents collaboratively.

Topic to be discussed
With the advent of CSCW systems, several applications have been developed to support co-authoring. Bringing both challenges and constraints to current co-authoring practices, CSCW systems open new ways of communicating and writing together. But despite the great technical improvements, studies still report little use of CSCWriting applications. Incorrect assumptions about writing and collaborative writing activities have become one of the main reasons for a lack of usage. Also, experiences of failures with CSCWriting applications have demonstrated that co-authors need to re-organize their habits and develop specific social, cognitive and technical skills in order to have real use of the applications. 

From this perspective we invite participants to discuss the following major question:

• What have we learnt from the successes and failures of computer supported collaborative writing applications?

And in particular:

• How do collaborative writing tools transform our ways of writing ?

• How should collaborative writing tools be designed in order to provide appropriate support for both individual and collaborative work?

Objective
The objective of the workshop is to promote the understanding of the mutual impact between CSCWriting and co-authoring practices and bring together an international group of researchers and practitioners to share experiences of the following topics:

• Co-authoring practices in academia and industry

• Stories of success or failures from co-authoring projects

• Experiences of co-authoring over the Internet

• Experiences of usage of tools for commenting and change representation

• Design of computer support for co-authoring 

• Evaluation of co-authoring tools 

• Criteria for analyzing collaborative writing activities

• Methods and concepts for a better understanding of collaborative writing activities

How to participate?
Contributions are invited in the form of a position paper (2 pages), including the problem to be discussed, the perspective developed and findings.

The title of the contribution should include name, affiliation, and e-mail address of the authors.

About10 participants will be accepted.

Submissions should to be sent to:Tessy@nada.kth.se

Preferably as attachments in RTF format

Or to

Tessy Cerratto
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
Nada-IPLab
SE-100 44 Stockholm
Sweden

Important dates

Activities during the workshop
Preliminary plan 
10.00 - 10.20 Welcome and Introduction
10.20 - 12.30 Position paper presentation and discussion
12.30 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.00 Position paper presentation and discussion
15.00 - 16.30 General discussion
16.30 - 17.00 Summarizing the outcomes of the workshop.

Accepted position papers will be distributed among confirmed participants in advance in order to facilitate focused and fruitful discussions.

Organising Committee
Teresa Cerratto, Ph D. in Cognitive Psychology - Post-doctoral researcher at the Interaction and Presentation Laboratory (IPLab) -NADA-KTH.

Kerstin Severinson Eklundh, Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, Researcher coordinator at IPLab-

Hee-Cheol (Ezra) Kim, Ph D Student at the Graduate School for Human-Machine Interaction

Program committee
In progress