Groupware What are the goals of a groupware system? - Facilitation - Coordination - Cooperation - Augmented, supported production Is efficiency the goal? - How can you be efficient with things you don’t know about? (tacit knowledge) - Is hardware and software are only improvement?

What makes a successful KMS? Goals defined before the system is sought or bought Knowledge Repository Connecting People, not just their knowledge Make knowledge shareable as you go Measure knowledge as part of performance Doesn’t depend on one thing or person Doesn’t do everything (at first?) Works with the culture, improves the culture Allows flexibility of people & the system(s)

Technological Progress Knowledge Appliances - PIM, PKM, PVC What if everyone had Lotus Notes and knew how to use it? KM and economic efficiency - People-centric - People as k units? “A matter of economic faith” Categorization and Organization - Personal, Group, Corporate taxonomies?

Instant Messaging in Action Real-time chat is more natural & informal than other choices ( , newsgroups) If used, may bring about more narrative or anecdotal knowledge “Outeraction” - communicative processes among each other & managing communication, not to explicitly exchange information Is it the right medium for the task or the available one? Easy to use, quick for coordination & scheduling Visibility of users gives extra information - Awareness, buddy lists, previous interactions - Asynchronous, but continual (a long, sporadic phone call) “It’s like working together, but not sharing an office”

Real time participation - chat? Butterfly uses IRC to build a database of content How much knowledge work can be done with interactive text? - Presence - Annotation - Conversation Recommending based on explicit queries - Reference Interviews? Combine help and normal conversation - Keywords for help, queries and updates

Using large social spaces How do you use or make sense of very large social interaction spaces? - Your own participation as anchor points - Dynamic views of topics and overall use Dynamic views “A key finding of collective action studies shows a mutual awareness of other participants’ histories and relationships is CRITICALTO A COOPERATIVE OUTCOME” Watching threads of conversations helps with selection and understanding of the community How would this work for merely a large space? - One organization or group of people?

AnswerGarden This is an organizational based space Help for commonly asked questions Ad hoc, real-time help vs. a personal interaction? - Can a database replace a mentor? - Does the community react & change without novelty and use? Use experts to tune and provide answers - Interview-like questions - Routing to correct information or expert Incentives, Proofing & Alternative Answers

YouServ Is simply sharing the answer? Is P2P the real difference? - Corporate policies - Personal reputation & accountability Drag and Drop to the Desktop - Personal connotation - Distributed storage (and retrieval) Uptime & replication Up to date, dynamic searching Ad hoc group coordination

Basic Support for Coop Work How about basic support for individual work first? - Applications - Training Web software is first platform for CSCW on the interenet - Will it be the last? - Will others use the network, not the applications? - Data stream exchange medium? Servers as shared workspaces Events and activity awareness - What’s new - Who’s working Let users control sharing and workgroups

Experiments with Oval How relevant is this now? Agents as metaphor, not applications Customization Links among objects Sharing - Db - Objects - Mail? What’s right about this system? Is everything possible with Web standard applications and protocols?

Expertise Recommender Finding help within the organization Just in time help Intricacies of locating expertise What if this scaled to the Web? - Validity of skill assessment - Meta data issues When do people need experts? - Situations, projects - General education Who’s busy? Technical Support

The Future of KM? 1996 View - “how knowledge will be managed in 10 years” WWW & Lotus Notes Hypertext, Links & Repositories Agents for searching Organizational enthusiasm Commonplace KM practices by 2000 Success & evaluation of KM work “Categorization and organization of knowledge will be a core competency of every firm” - Vocabulary, search tools, navigation aides More time working together

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