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A demo session (with a session named "room2")

You will need to open two different Web browsers (e.g. IE/Chrome, Safari/Firefox) and login the system using two different screen names to experience the real time cooperative features of the systems (especially, when you are in a session without others).  You may log on the system as normal participant or as session chair.  By logging on the system as Session chair, you will have more access power to control the meeting process (e.g., to lead all participants from one agenda item to another in the InMeeting mode).

Theoretical frameworks

The success of collaborative activities depends on sufficient participation and effective cooperation. Successful participation and cooperation needs effective facilitation support that can engage people, coordinate their joint actions and advance their common understanding. In the following, a multi-dimensional framework for wide participation, coordination and common understanding is presented. The dimensions of the participation framework include methodology, technology, and community; while the coordination framework is derived from various social cognitive theories on coordination and common understanding. Such a framework may help us characterise the issues, describe the settings, understand, infer and explain the kind of facilitation support we may need, so as to guide the design and use of Web based collaborative systems.

Framework for participation

The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in an interview [7] said that: "I really like the idea of people building things in hypertext, the sort of a common hypertext space to explain what the common understanding is and thus capturing all the ideas, which led to a given position. I think that's really important.”

Although the Web infrastructure supports both reading and writing access from its start, for a long time wide participation of joint activities on the Web, especially those involving content creation using write-access, had not taken off. Berners-Lee believes that the recent wide pick up of Wiki and Blog for such activities is partly because they do a lot of the management of the navigation for people and allow people to add content themselves easily [7] – i.e. by providing better technical facilitation to make the wide participation easier. In his closing speech at the WikiSystem 2006 conference, Ward Cunningham summarized his method for his multiple successful inventions including CRC cards, Extreme Programming, and Wiki, into a three dimensional framework that in his words involves a little bit of technology innovation, a little bit of methodology underlying the technology, a little bit of glue to engage a community using this methodology and technology. Particular to Wiki, these include a technology invention on hypertext authoring: if one creates a link to a page that does not exist, then a new page is created. The methodology behind this hypertext technology is piecemeal growth of the content in a common hypertext space. A community is brought together by a joint activity to pool their expertise together through making multi perspective updates in the common hypertext space. In an interview published in WikiSym’06 [3], three leading Wikipedia practitioners unveiled the goal, roles, processes, and sociology that make up the successful Wikipedia project. The goal to create a free encyclopaedia (in a sense of free expression and free access) has motivated many people to participate and contribute. Various roles, their responsibility and promotion path are documented. Working processes, e.g., for quality assurance, have been emerged, evolved and documented. These behind of scene effort highlighted the importance of facilitation support for the group processes underlying the successful wide participation. Google’s innovative hypertext search technology has made it easy for people to find what they want from an enormous seemingly arbitrarily structured Web. The gradual growth of their data and service resources are facilitated by their unique academic-like creative enterprise culture. Flickr, YouTube, Blog, and Fackbook have made the publishing and organising of photos, video clips, personal views, and social interaction easier [4]. They have provided a Web 2.0 platform to satisfying people’s need for self expression, creativity, and socialising.

Figure 1. Framework for facilitating wide participation

Participation means taking part in joint activities for the purpose of reaching a common goal. eParticipation often refers to the use of information and communication technologies to broaden and deepen political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another and with their elected representatives [8]. In this paper we take the former more general definition on taking part in any online collaborative activities. 

Figure 1 shows a three-dimensional framework extended from Cunningham’s framework on Wiki, first by adding the factors that contributed to Wikipedia’s success, and then by incorporating the success factors that we identified from the observation and literature review of other Web 2.0 success stories, including Google, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, and many open source projects [9]. On the technology dimension, all these success stories are built on some sort of Web 2.0 technology that adds a little bit technical innovation to the standard Web infrastructure. On the methodology dimension, they all encourage piecemeal contribution by anyone and provide fast feedback loops and a transparent working process that help people work together. Their network effect is created by providing ease of engagement with a low cost access to the system, non-monetary incentives for contribution, and common objectives of a joint activity (e.g., a joint product, decision, or entertainment).

Framework for coordination and common understanding

To support common understanding, we need first to understand the process of understanding that happens to an individual and the process of common understanding that happens to morn than one person.

In Jean Piaget’s cognitive theory on learning and understanding, individual understanding happens in a pair of assimilation and accommodation processes [6].  Assimilation means the utilization of the external environment by the individual to integrate knowledge into his/her prior internal knowledge structures.  Accommodation means modification of prior knowledge structure when properties of the environment do not fit into the internal structures.  Piagetian scholars argue that a difference in perspective is necessary for understanding.  In trying to resolve conflicts, participants have to explain to each other their points of view.   This corroborates with Herbert Clark’s social cognitive theory on dialogue and shared understanding.

According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a “common ground” of knowledge between them.  Such common ground includes their mutual believe, mutual knowledge, and their mutual suppositions [1]. Establishing this common ground will involve negotiating the meanings of the signals and constructing shared interpretations of the signals. Such a process is called grounding [1].  By providing settings that are similar to face-to-face conversation settings, participants can benefit from the immediacy of feedback, flexible control, and rich media, which are essential for providing grounding evidences.   

Figure 2. Framework for coordination and common understanding

Shared or common understanding happens and advances through both direct and indirect communication between the participants [1]. What makes an activity a joint one is the coordination effort that moves their working process towards its social purpose. Coordination happens through many coordination devices, such as explicit agreements (e.g., well defined roles, process descriptions, contracts), conventions (e.g., when a group regularly meets, culture of a community), and precedents (e.g., when we meet last week).  What coordination devices do is to give the participants a rational, a basis, for believing that they and their partners will converge on the same joint action [1].

Figure on the right-hand side describes the entities and their relationships in a social and cognitive framework for joint action and common understanding.  This framework integrates elements of Piaget’s cognitive theory on understanding and Clark’s social cognitive theory on dialogue, common ground, and shared understanding.  In Figure 2, E stands for the real world Environment in which the cooperation happens; Pr1 and Pr2 for persons taking role r1 and r2; CH for cooperative hypermedia workspace, including information structure, working processes and tools for a joint task; CG for common ground (including roles, processes, and background information) needed for establishing a shared understanding on the task.  Participants communicate and coordinate their joint action through direct communication, indirect feedback from others, and feed through information provided by shared artefacts in the common hypermedia workspace.  In their conversation, they may refer to objects in the shared hypermedia workspace (See the dashed “Deixis” arrow line pointing to CH) and may base their conversation on the common ground they believe they share at the moment (See the dashed “based on” arrow line to CG).  Understanding and common understanding will be reached and evolved in the cognitive and social interactions between the elements as depicted in this framework.  More details on this conceptual framework can be found in [12].