Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-99-01 Abstract

Collaborative Sense-Making in Design: Involving Stakeholders via Representational Morphing
Techreport ID: kmi-99-01
Date: 1999
Author(s): Simon J. Buckingham Shum and Albert M. Selvin*

A central concern in CSCW research is to understand, and represent, the perspectives of the different stakeholders in the design process. This paper suggests collaborative sense-making as a way to view the process toward creating mutually intelligible representations. In order to do this, we describe the types of obstacles that can impede representational literacy across communities of practice coming together in a design effort. We then offer representational morphing as a strategy for addressing these obstacles, and show how it has been implemented in an approach and hypermedia groupware environment named Project Compendium. We conclude by reflecting on the key features of the approach and collaborative tool support which have contributed to this project1s success to date. * Bell Atlantic Corporation Network Systems Advanced Technology 400 Westchester Avenue White Plains, NY 10604 U.S.A.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection