Remote Cooperation: CSCW Issues for Mobile and Teleworkers

Computer supported work is increasingly being done out of the traditional office environment, for example whilst travelling or at home and there is a growing need to support the cooperative aspects of such work. Remote Cooperation looks at ways of improving the available communications, through the use of packet radio and compression techniques, in order to reduce the imbalance between office-based and mobile workers. It also assesses how the effectiveness of the existing communications infrastructure can be improved, by providing cooperative applications which fit within its limitations.
Broadly divided into five sections - social and economic context, application domains, software technology and infrastructure, communications technology and infrastructure, working and learning from home - this volume contains contributions from both the research community and industry.

So Near Yet So Far.- The Structure of this Book.- Framing the Problem.- Future Directions and Further Information.- 1 Working in the Virtual Office.- 1.1 Introduction.- 1.2 Why Are People Working in Virtual Offices?.- 1.3 Technology for the Virtual Office.- 1.4 Advantages of Working in a Virtual Office.- 1.5 Disadvantages of Working in a Virtual Office.- 1.6 Addressing the Disadvantages of the Virtual Office.- 2 CSCW for the Mobile Teleworker.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 How Telework Concepts Affect Field Based Mobile Workers.- 2.3 How Telework Concepts Affect Intrinsically Mobile Workers.- 2.4 The Basic Technology for Mobile Telework.- 2.5 The Role of CSCW.- 2.6 The Basic Technology of CSCW for Mobile Workers.- 2.7 The Interaction Between CSCW and Telework.- 2.8 Teamworking Across Enterprise Boundaries.- 3 The Electronic Hard Hat: CSCW on the Construction Site.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Review of Past Work.- 3.2.1 Effective Group Working over a Wide Geographical Area.- 3.2.2 Cyclops.- 3.2.3 Electronic Data Interchange.- 3.2.4 The Special Needs of the Construction Industry.- 3.3 Available Technology.- 3.3.1 Video Telephones.- 3.3.2 Wireless LANs.- 3.3.3 Pen Based Computers.- 3.3.4 ISDN.- 3.3.5 Miniature Cameras.- 3.3.6 Head-Up Displays.- 3.4 CSCW on the Construction Site: a Possible Scenario.- 3.5 The Electronic Hard Hat.- 3.5.1 The Totally Independent Hard Hat.- 3.5.2 The Two-part Hard Hat.- 3.5.3 Experience to Date.- 3.5.4 Usability Issues.- 3.6 Future Scenarios.- 3.6.1 Real-Time Project Control.- 3.6.2 Human Centered Construction.- 3.7 Conclusion: A Plea to Communications Companies.- 4 Support for Community Care.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 Community Health Services and Community Care Workers.- 4.3 Community Care Systems.- 4.4 The Field Trial of System B.- 4.5 Some Results of the Evaluation Exercise.- 4.6 Comparison with System A.- 4.7 Conclusion.- 5 The’ salesman’s Promise’: CSCW in Sales.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 The Cell Based Factory.- 5.3 Sales Scenarios.- 5.3.1 Scenario 1.- 5.3.2 Scenario 2.- 5.4 Product Advisor.- 5.4.1 Automatic Product/Capacity Match.- 5.4.2 Customer Suggestion.- 5.5 Conclusions.- 6 Observations on Practically Perfect CSCW.- 6.1 Introduction.- 6.2 General Requirements.- 6.2.1 Transparency.- 6.2.2 Consistency.- 6.2.3 Gracefulness.- 6.2.4 Purely Technical Issues.- 6.3 Toward Observational Properties.- 6.3.1 On Formality.- 6.3.2 Why Use Mathematics?.- 6.3.3 User Models.- 6.3.4 Where is the User Model?.- 6.4 Using the Model.- 6.4.1 More on Modeling.- 6.4.2 Observational Properties.- 6.4.3 Task and Observational Property Fit.- 6.5 Toward Practically Perfect CSCW.- 6.5.1 Liveware.- 6.5.2 Problems with Liveware.- 6.6 Conclusions.- Acknowledgements.- 7 Personal Information Management in the Context of Collaborative Work.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Personal Information Management and the Representational Focus.- 7.3 Time Management: A Case for CSCW?.- 7.4 Personal Information Management and CSCW.- 8 Activity Coordination in Decentralized Working Environments.- 8.1 Introduction.- 8.2 Some Aspects of Activity Coordination.- 8.2.1 The Personal Perspective.- 8.2.2 The Group’s Collaboration Perspective.- 8.2.3 The Intra-Organizational Perspective.- 8.2.4 The Inter-Organizational Perspective.- 8.3 The Task Manager: An Example for Activity Coordination.- 8.4 Consistency in an Asynchronous Environment.- 8.4.1 Linearizability.- 8.4.2 Transaction Mechanisms.- 8.4.3 Virtual Synchronism.- 8.5 Conflict Handling.- 8.5.1 Automatic Resolution Based on Commutativity.- 8.5.2 Resolution Involving the User.- 8.6 Mobility and Activity Coordination.- 8.7 Summary.- 8.8 Outlook.- 9 Information Requirements of Distributed Workers.- 9.1 Introduction.- 9.2 Background ― The Workers and the Technology.- 9.2.1 Mobile Working.- 9.2.2 Teleworking.- 9.2.3 Slow Networks.- 9.3 Principal Topics.- 9.4 Retrieval and Caching.- 9.4.1 Traditional Caching.- 9.4.2 Transparency.- 9.4.3 Caching for Distributed Work.- 9.4.4 Handling Failure.- 9.5 Synchronization.- 9.5.1 Existing Solutions.- 9.5.2 Forms of Update.- 9.5.3 MSC-Concurrency.- 9.5.4 MSC-Distribution.- 9.5.5 Remaining Problems.- 9.6 Other Areas and Future Work.- 9.7 Summary.- 10 Mobile Open Systems Technology for the Utilities Industries.- 10.1 Introduction.- 10.2 Requirements of Mobile Utilities Workers.- 10.2.1 Network Maintenance.- 10.2.2 Related Applications.- 10.2.3 The Need for Integration.- 10.2.4 Application Characteristics.- 10.3 Integration Technologies.- 10.3.1 Open Systems Standards.- 10.3.2 The ANSA Architecture.- 10.4 Mobile Computing Technologies.- 10.4.1 Mobile Computing Technology.- 10.4.2 Local Area Communications Technologies.- 10.4.3 Wide Area Communications Technologies.- 10.4.4 Network Interfaces.- 10.5 The Impact of Mobility on Distributed Systems Platforms.- 10.5.1 Computational Issues.- 10.5.2 Engineering Issues.- 10.6 The MOST Approach.- 10.7 Concluding Remarks.- 11 The Distributed Home Environment and the New Oikos.- 11.1 Introduction.- 11.2 The Oikos Concept.- 11.2.1 The Shape of the New Oikos.- 11.2.2 Activities in the New Oikos.- 11.3 The Distributed Home and Telework.- 11.3.1 The Virtual Distributed Home.- 11.3.2 Telework.- 11.4 The Homelink Project.- 11.5 Future Directions.- 11.6 Summary.- 12 Teaching, Learning and Collaborating at a Virtual Summer School.- 12.1 Introduction.- 12.1.1 Motivation.- 12.1.2 Open University Context.- 12.1.3 This Chapter.- 12.2 Design Issues.- 12.2.1 Pedagogical Goals.- 12.2.2 Practical Design.- 12.2.3 Technical Design.- 12.3 Teaching and Learning at a VSS.- 12.3.1 Timetable.- 12.3.2 Warm-up Period.- 12.3.3 Week One: Language Understanding.- 12.3.4 The Guest Lecture.- 12.3.5 Week Two: Artificial Intelligence.- 12.4 Evaluation and Discussion.- 12.4.1 The Warm-up Period.- 12.4.2 The Language Project Evaluation.- 12.4.3 The Artificial Intelligence Project Evaluation.- 12.4.3 Comparing the Two Projects.- 12.4.5 Overall.- 12.5 Discussion and Conclusions.- Appendix: A Detailed Profile of the VSS Students.- References.- Name Index.