Mantei, Marilyn M.
Mantei describes the EDS augmented meeting room. The mechanisms include a table with Mac computers embedded, and a Mac that controls a front screen. Access to the front screen Mac is via a pre-emptory handover mechanism. A number of groups used the room, and issues such as where the "power seat" was, and who scribed were observed.
We decide that the room was a "joint authorship" meeting room rather than a place for all types (e.g., including ad hoc) of meetings.
T.P. Moran, L. Palen, S. Harrison, P. Chiu, D. Kimber, S. Minneman, W. van Melle, P. Zellweger
A team from Xerox PARC and UC Irvine developed a salvaging tool and conducted a case study on it. Salvaging involves going through the artifacts of a meeting, such as drawings, notes, and oral comments; organizing them; indexing them; and creating new materials from them.
By observing one person using the tools for nine months, they discovered that the way he salvaged depended greatly on how familiar he was with the subject matter and how familiar he was with the product. For the subject he knew, physics, he didn't use the audio record much, and he used it less over time.
For the subject he didn't know, software, he started out listening to all of the audio while typing the report. Later, he explicitly made "Hear Audio" marks during the meeting, and then concentrated his playback of the audio around those marks. Eventually, the salvager's reports contained many things from the meeting verbatim, and he acted as "a channel of communication without distorting the signal."
Murray Turoff
Turoff claims that Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) systems focus too much on trying to emulate face-to-face communication and not enough on asynchronous communication. The CMC systems used at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System) 2, TEIES, and Personal EIES, focus more on asychronous communication. They do this by structuring communication into such components as conferences, messages, activities, and notifications. Activities are the major extensibility mechanism, and notifications make quick communication easier.
Strengths: Turoff provides a useful categorization of asynchronous communication, and at the time the systems were first developed, the ideas presented were novel and original.
Weaknesses: From today's point of view, EIES and its related systems look nothing more than glorified Internet e-mail and Usenet newsgroups. Also, EIES systems seem to provide too much structure and not enough flexiblity.
Last modified on 13 Oct 1997 by TDH
Authors: James Lin and Todd Hodes