By working together people can do
things that would be difficult or impossible
for any individual.
This is a report on the colab project at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center.
We're studying how people organize themselves
for group work and are exploring ways
to make teamwork more effective.
Well PARC became well known for its invention
of the personal computer.
But most work that people do is actually
done by groups of people, cooperating, collaborating,
pulling their ideas together.
Teamwork is actually a kind of phenomenon
that is important to most organizations.
It's responsible for most of the things people can do together.
So at PARC we have a collection of projects
which are trying to study collaboration
of different kinds, how people can work together over time,
how people can work together over distance,
or even how people working at the same time in the course
of a meeting can be more effective with the use
of new kinds of technology.
To understand the use of new meeting technologies,
we must first understand something of current practice.
Members of the colab group, along with other researchers
at PARC, are observing and analyzing groups at work
in traditional meeting settings.
Everybody has to work with other people.
And everybody's experienced frustration and difficulties
working with other people.
However, if we look at real people in real meeting
situations, we discover that the surprise is not
that people have difficulties working with one another,
but rather that they succeed so much of the time.
PARC scientists are exploring the ways
small groups engaged in complex tasks regulate their behavior
and use spatial relationships on traditional display media.
Although there's no apriori reason to expect it,
people will use whatever space is available to them.
They mark things down in different places.
And the places have a relationship to one another.
Sometimes that relationship is discussed explicitly,
and sometimes it's just implicit in the arrangement
of the objects.
Here we see a clip of people doing engineering design
work using a whiteboard.
We can trace the progress of their work over the two hour
meeting, both in their activity rising up from their chairs
to stand at the board, sitting on the table,
and in the development of the marks on the board.
Other meetings show other patterns.
Only by looking closely can we see the particular function
of the board in any given interaction.
But the importance of placement as a resource
is indicated by the fact that people remember it.
Long after items are erased, we see people point at the place
where they were written and say, that idea.
And other people know what they were talking about.
It's a common myth that people talk first one.
And then the other, this myth captures the reality
that there is a sequential order in speech,
but of course people often interrupt one another
while all present are still able to make sense out
of what's going on.
Similarly, we see groups negotiating extremely complex
behavior, writing, talking, moving,
drawing, at the same time or nearly the same time
without any discourtesy or confusion.
Group work is complicated not just
at the level of subject matter or conscious decision
but in its underlying organization.
Working with other people is a skill as
fundamental as walking.
It's complex.
It's necessary, and we notice it only
when we're having some sort of difficulty.
When we're working in a group, the interactions
are very, very precisely timed in relationship to each other
and in relationship to whatever other drawing, writing
activities are going on at the same time.
People have incredibly, finely developed skills
at regulating interaction in subtle ways, ways
that we don't remember necessarily
clearly after the fact, ways we don't think about.
For solving complex design problems,
for working in complex situations,
people need to be able to draw on their resources not just
as experts but also as people.
To be useful and powerful, any new technology
intended to support group work must let
the group actually do the work.
As part of the colab project, we're
building a new computer based communication medium.
This is the colab meeting room, a facility
to explore face-to-face meetings of small working groups
usually two to six people.
The room is flexible and allows the sharing of information
in various ways.
This meeting room contains several Xerox computers
with special communications and meeting software.
The workstations are connected by Xerox ethernet.
This allows each station to communicate
with any or all of the others.
Since we wanted people to really use the colab meeting room,
it had to be both comfortable and easy
to meet in with the computer presence as
unobtrusive as possible.
To allow people to maintain eye contact,
the workstations are set into the modular conference table.
We tried to make the colab meeting
room feel like an ordinary conference room,
so people would feel free to use their usual effective meeting
skills.
We also provide a blackboard-sized screen
projection that we call the live-board.
Even when used simply as a large display
without special software, the live-board
helps support group work by providing a shared focus.
In this respect it's like a blackboard,
but unlike a blackboard, any person's active computer screen
may be displayed on the board.
We want to design the colab room for flexibility
to be able to accommodate many different kinds of meetings.
For example for a meeting in which there is a single focus,
we have a large screen in which all the people in the room
can focus on that one screen.
For some meetings you want to compare different systems that
have different kinds of images.
So we have each screen in that room
able to connect to the same workstation
or to different ones.
And we can compare each of the workstations
with the big screen or with a workstation that's adjacent.
Finally, for group software we've
put in special communication software that
allows individuals to see a common area on their screen,
which they can share.
While extensions of single user facilities are interesting,
most of the colab project has been
devoted to the exploration of software to support group work.
The key idea is to provide a shared workspace
for a group that appears on each person's workstation.
The first time we used colab, we weren't
even sure it was going to work before,
and we had never really used shared workspaces before.
We were used to using personal workspaces.
And it was a terrifically productive
to see other people's ideas popping up and being connected
to what I was doing as I was doing it.
Here we see a shared workspace embedded in private workspaces.
To understand a shared group workspace, think
of a computerized blackboard available to you
and to everyone else from where you sit.
The computerized blackboard makes
it easy to rearrange items, to change or delete them,
or even to recall something you accidentally erased.
Such a system can also remember the entire workspace,
so it can be reconstituted for the next meeting.
One problem with distributed shared workspaces
occurs if you try to point your finger
at the screen in front of you.
No one else can see where you're pointing.
The large black arrow appearing here
is a telepointer, showing where someone
else at another workstation is pointing in a shared workspace.
To give you a better idea of how software can support
a particular kind of meeting, let's focus
for a few minutes on the meeting tool we use the most.
We designed a tool called Cognoter
to support small groups that are trying
to organize some information for a paper or a talk.
The way it works is they can put little pieces of information
up on the screen, you can shove these things around,
play around with it until they get a structure that they
can use as an annotated outline that
will serve as the basis for their paper or the talk.
In the first part of a Cognoter session,
the goal is to have people get ideas out of their heads
and into the computer system.
Everyone in the group has equal and immediate access
to the shared workspace.
They enter items, brief descriptions of their ideas,
as soon as they think of them.
Items contributed by others appear on your screen
even as you enter an item of your own.
In the first part of Cognoter, we
want the tool to stay out of the way as much as possible.
We want it to be flexible and want
to be as little delay as possible
when people put their ideas down.
And that way we expect it will be much more useful.
To expand on the short idea phrases longer pieces of text
can be associated with them.
In this multi-user system, everyone can see and manipulate
the shared information.
They can add or change items simultaneously.
To coordinate this parallel activity,
visual busy signals warn you when an item is
being modified by someone else.
When the generation of ideas slows down,
the group begins to order the ideas.
Links can be drawn between items.
And items that are closely related
can be grouped together.
To specify a preferred ordering, directed links
are drawn from one item to another.
Items that belong together can be gathered into a group.
Many times a prospective group is clustered spatially
before the grouped items are removed
from the visual workspace, leaving a single group
item in their place.
A group is represented as an item surrounded by brackets.
The internal organization of a group
can be displayed in a separate shared workspace.
In this setting, it often happens
that some of the participants will
choose to fine tune a part of the structure
while the rest of the group does something else.
The shared data, seen up to now in graphical form,
can also be displayed in outline form.
An annotated outline is generated
using the ordering links, the spatial relationships,
and the grouping of items.
This document designed by the group
will serve as the organizational basis for their presentation.
Cognoter is only one tool that allows computers to assist
in collaborative work.
It helps our group with the task we do often,
but there are many other group activities
that could be supported by collaborative tools.
We're building a number of different colab tools.
And people outside of this group are beginning to use them.
To understand how well these tools work in practice,
we've equipped the colab meeting room
with a number of cameras and microphones
that allow us to tape these meetings as they happen.
Reviewing these tapes should help
us to understand how we can improve our tools,
make them easier to use, and make them more efficient.
To help us analyze the fairly massive amount of information
that gets generated in a typical colab session,
we've created what we term the meeting analysts' workstation.
The meeting analysts' workstation
provides coordinated access to the large amount of audio,
video, and computational information
that's generated in a typical session.
Anthropologists and psychologists
at the Palo Alto Research Center are studying and comparing
ordinary meetings using whiteboards with those
that take place using colab.
We expect insights from these analysis
to help us in the design and refinement
of future collaboration technology.
After seeing the colab you might ask,
is this what meetings should be like?
And there's something pretty implausible about the story
that people working in their offices use one kind of tools.
But when it's time for a meeting,
they gather up their things and go
to the special room, a kind of high technology,
Star Trek room with computers, and gadgets, and people
somehow working together.
We're asking ourselves now what should
the next generation of collaboration technology
be like.
And there's a key idea behind this which is seamlessness.
And by seamlessness we mean that group work
aught to merge smoothly with individual work,
that group tools aught to merge smoothly with individual tools,
even that colab kinds of tools aught
to begin to appear in the office.
So for example on the walls, there
aught to be active whiteboards that
are like the live-board you saw in the colab.
But this technology aught not get in the way.
We think of it as being something
which should just disappear into the furniture as it will.
So that people when they're working together
can focus on shaping their ideas.