Statistics Canada found that:

Not only is the notion of a paperless society defeated by existing data, but a visit to any modern office workplace will confirm that printers everywhere continue to spit out massive amounts of paper, and paper recycling bins are full,

There are also social behavioural trends in ICT and communication that are discussed:

The pattern of communication and interaction has changed. The reality is that people are talking to other people – whether to the person next door or to someone thousands of miles and time zones away. Thus, it is not that people are becoming anti-social; it is that people are becoming differently social.

In summary, key outcomes of ICTs are manifested in shifting behavioural patterns everywhere, with real consequences. Moreover, the pattern of communications has changed, something exemplified by the rise in long distance and the explosion in international calling made possible by
liberalized markets and falling prices. Such expanded circles of communication have found an even better expression through e-mail that knows no boundaries. People make the choice to expand their associations and move from geographically defined communities to communities of interest. As well, they are willing to pay for their choices. ICT spending is on the rise and, within this higher spending, substitutions take place in favour of newer ICTs, such as the Internet, and against older ones, such as the telephone. The willingness of people to pay can also be seen by the fact that many low income households choose to spend a relatively higher proportion of their income on ICTs.

A summary of the report can be found in this CBC news report.

This report confirms finding from Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen who wrote The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001) and found that paper usage increased on average 40% because of email in an organisation).

Relevance: Although offices are using paper more, I wonder about whether students are printing more in universities. I would say that they are printing less. I spend a significant time with my laptop around undergrads that I see reading papers in pdf form online on their laptop rather than printing them out. This may be due to convenience and a desire for cost savings. Perhaps, older people just feel more comfortable with paper.

Technorati Tags: cscw, cbc, harper, social, internet, email, technology, ict

Dourish, P. and Bly, S. 1992. Portholes: supporting awareness in a
distributed work group. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, California, United
States, May 03 – 07, 1992). P. Bauersfeld, J. Bennett, and G. Lynch,
Eds. CHI ’92. ACM Press, New York, NY, 541-547.

ABSTRACT

We are investigating ways in which media space technologies can
support distributed work groups through access to information that
supports general awareness. Awareness involves knowing who is
“around”, what activities are occurring, who is talking with whom; it
provides a view of one another in the daily work environments.
Awareness may lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections,
and the development of shared cultures—all important aspects of
maintaining working relationships which are denied to groups
distributed across multiple sites. The Portholes project, at Rank
Xerox EuroPARC in Cambridge, England, and Xerox PARC in Palo Alto,
California, demonstrates that awareness can be supported across
distance. A data network provides a shared database of image
information that is regularly updated and available at all sites.
Initial experiences of the system in use at EuroPARC and PARC suggest
that Portholes both supports shared awareness and helps to build a
“sense of community”.

The questions are group had with the paper were the following:
1. If portholes are so good, why don’t we see them right now?
2. This paper can out shortly before the Web, how would it be different after the Web?
3. Regarding the issue of privacy, how would participants perceive this system if icons were used as an awareness symbol rather than an actual live image?
4. Paul Dourith and Sara Bly are still involved in CSCW research. How has this paper influenced the different perspectives they have taken for their research since 1992?
5. Reading that participants found the tool to be “cool” may be mean much. How do evaluate the quality of the user feedback? How have evaluation techniques for these types of papers improved since 1992?
6. There have been a number of studies that have explored voyeurism, lying, and notions of privacy, how does this paper fit in this area?
7. This study was conducted at at research centre rather than a company. Would a company provide a different emphasis on the value of the experiences of the participants such as the economic bottom line?
8. How important is it to know who is watching you? Does privacy mean putting a sheet over your camera or should there be a lightweight ability to offer grandularity in this area?
9. Does familiarity shape awareness?

Relevance: I enjoy using IM and I wonder the degree to which I would be bothered by this system. Would my feelings differ in the workplace vs. university vs. a research centre?

Technorati tags: awareness, cscw, collaboration, groups

The 2006 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS 2006)
May 14-17, 2006
Luxor Hotel, Resort and Casino
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

In Technical Sponsorship with the IEEE (Pending)

(Submission Deadline: December 30, 2005)

Invitation:
You
are cordially invited to participate in and attend the International
Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems to be held May
14-17, 2006 at the Luxor Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
The symposium is to address, explore and exchange information on the
state-of-the-art in collaborative enterprises, their modeling and
simulation, design and use, and their impact. Participation is extended
to researchers, designers, educators and interested parties in all CTS
disciplines and specialties.
Purpose: The symposium will include invited presentations from experts from academia, industry, and government as well as contributed paper presentations describing original work on the current state of research in collaborative technologies, collaborative systems and all related issues. There will also be tutorial sessions, workshops, special sessions, demos, panel discussions and exhibits.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Frameworks and Methodologies for Collaboration
- Architectures and Design of Collaborative Systems
- Coordination, Cooperation and Collaboration
- Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (CE)
- Collaboration Enabling Technologies
- Analysis & Visualization of Collaborative Applications
- Tools for Collaborative Environments
- Enterprise and CE Heterogeneity
- Information Infrastructure for Collaboration
- Platforms for Collaboration
- Mobile and Wireless Collaborative Systems
- Web Infrastructure for Collaborative Applications
- Collaborative Human-Centric Systems
- Data Mining & Warehousing for Collaborative Technologies
- Collaborative Knowledge Management
- Collaborative Decision Making and Support
- Information Exchange and Fusion in CE
- Interfaces for Collaborative Work
- Shared Virtual Reality and Applications
- Intelligent Agents in Collaborative Applications
- Multi Agent Systems in Collaboration
- Cluster-based Collaborative & Distributed Systems
- Grid-based Collaborative Environments
- Collaborative Enterprise Security & Access Control
- Trusted and Reputation Based Collaboration
- Role-based Policies and Algorithms
- Coordination and Cooperation Mechanisms
- Context-& Situation based Collaboration
- Awareness in Collaborative Systems
- Work and the Virtual Collaborative World
- Collaborative Machines and Robots
- Designing Collaborative Organizations
- Collaborative Autonomous Systems & Vehicles
“,1]
);

//–>
Purpose:
The
symposium will include invited presentations from experts from
academia, industry, and government as well as contributed paper
presentations describing original work on the current state of research
in collaborative technologies, collaborative systems and all related
issues. There will also be tutorial sessions, workshops, special
sessions, demos, panel discussions and exhibits.

For further details and updates, please consult the conference web site at URL: http://www.engr.udayton.edu/faculty/wsmari/cts06.

Technorati tags: cfp, collaboration

Listen to the title: All W and No P Makes CSCW a Dull Field: Supporting Ludic Collaboration
Wow. I am quite interested in learning more about Play especially as it relates to CSCW.

Relevance: I am interested in hearing examples where workplaces are incorporating play into their every practices. How does play influence one’s sense of being part of a team when everyone is co-located vs. distributed team-members?

Technorati tags: cscw, conference, Play

(deadline: November 21st, 2005)

7th International Conference
on the Design of Cooperative Systems
Provence, France – May 9-12, 2006

COOP’06 is the 7th International Conference on the Design of
Cooperative Systems, held at Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France. The
conference aims to bring together researchers who contribute to the
analysis and design of cooperative systems and their integration in
organizational settings. The challenge of the conference is to advance:
* Understanding and modelling collaborative work mediated by
technical artefacts
* Design methodologies for cooperative work analysis and
cooperative systems design
* New technologies supporting cooperation
* Concepts and socio-technical solutions for the application
of cooperative systems
Previous COOP conferences suggest that cooperative systems design
requires deep understanding of groups’ and organizations’ cooperative work, involving both artefacts and social practices.

Submissions are solicited from a wide range of disciplines: computer
sciences (CSCW, HCI, Information Systems, Knowledge Engineering
etc.), organizational and management sciences, sociology, psychology,
anthropology, ergonomics, linguistics, etc. contributing to the
fields of cooperative systems design

Theoretical contributions, empirical studies reports, software
development experiences, innovative concepts are welcome on such
topics as:
* Analysis of collaborative work situations
* Conceptual frameworks for understanding cooperative work
* Guidelines for designing cooperative systems
* The influence of new technologies (mobile computing,
ubiquitous computing, etc.) on cooperation
* Expertise sharing and learning in cooperative work
* Communities and new forms of organization
* Innovative technological solutions and user interfaces
* Methods for participatory design of cooperative systems
IT-infrastructures are used to support cooperation and collaboration
in a wide range of sectors (e-business, e-government, health care,
open source software development, etc.) is. Although many of these
types of application are not explicitly designed as “cooperative
systems”, COOP 2006 welcomes contributions describing concepts and experience in these fields.

COOP 06 is particularly keen to encourage contributions relating the
design of cooperative systems to:

Seamless integration of artefacts and conversations – enhanced
concepts of communication infrastructure

The emergence and distribution of cooperative systems has been
accompanied by increased communication workload. This is
characterized by increased information exchange, message overflow,
numerous interruptions of work, cognitive overload, or a dominance of
virtual context. To alleviate and improve the situation, greater
integration of conversational acts (e.g. message exchange) and
documents is clearly required. Technological and organizational
concepts currently available could support a greater degree of
seamless interplay between conversation and documentation than is
currently the case. This seamless integration should also analyse and
improve the relationship between the tangible world of documents
(e.g. paper) and their representations within digital media (covering
chat, newsgroups, annotations, e-mail, blogs, video-recording etc.).
On the other hand, a persistent problem is that different
communication situations, volatile as well as perennial conversation
needs, and the entire range of communication, both formal and
informal are invariably handled with a single, uniform type of media,
such as e-mail. This contrasts with the diverse forms of
communication means commonly associated with real objects existing in
the world of work.
Coop06 especially welcomes contributions which provide analyses and
concepts for design in this area. Special topics might be:
* Interaction and integration of different communication
devices and document standards;
* Role of annotations and of documents in the coordination of
activities;
* Communication management inside organisations and communities;
* Crossing from digital to tangible artefact;
* Specific use of documentation by communities: OSS practices,
healthcare files, e-government, e-business…
* Integration of conversation and documentation in the context
of learning and knowledge management
* The integration of synchronous and asynchronous means of
communication

Submissions may be:
* full papers (10 pages) or short papers (6 pages); deadline:
21st of Nov., 2005
* workshops proposals (including a description of the topic,
the format of the workshop and the organization committee) special
deadline: 9th of Jan., 2006
* doctoral colloquium contributions (special deadline: 9th of
January, 2006).
Papers will be presented in plenary sessions or at a special format
called “interactive paper session”.

Submission details will be provided at the conference web site:

http://tech-web-n2.utt.fr/coop/

Technorati tags: cfp, cscw, cooperation

It is cool that I will get a chance to meet a fellow Canadian blogger I have been following named Sylvie Noël. She will also be in my workshop. She commented on 5 minutes not being alot of time of time for a presentation so I was thinking of ditching the powerpoint presentation and doing a skit. It would be more fun.

I will be a student volunteer so it should be fun to meet other students with CSCW interests. If you are there, come up and say hello.

In an earlier post, Sylvie spoke about blogging at CSCW 2006. I am definitely going to try to blog at ECSCW depending on the network availability. It will be from a student volunteer perspective as I won’t be able to attend on the paper presentations. It may be useful to organise at meetup there with other bloggers.

[update] Relevance: The conference will give me an opportunity to seek out potential PhD advisors in UK/Europe for 2006.

To participate in a workshop, send a position paper to one of the organizers by Monday, June 20. See the description of each workshop for details. You will be notified of the acceptance/rejection of your position paper by early July, in time to register for the conference at the early rate.

Workshop 1 – Healthcare

Reconfiguring Healthcare: Issues in Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Healthcare Environments

Ellen Balka, Simon Fraser University and Vancouver Coastal Health Ina Wagner, Technical University of Vienna

Workshop 2 – Games

Computer Games and CSCW

Elaine M. Raybourn, Sandia National Laboratories
Léonie Schäfer, European Commission – DG INFSO
Uta Pankoke-Babatz, Fraunhofer FIT
Amanda Oldroyd, BT – Broadband Applications Research Centre

Workshop 3 – Activity

Activity – From a Theoretical to a Computational Construct

Jakob E. Bardram, University of Aarhus
Thomas P. Moran, IBM Research

Workshop 4 – Place

Settings for Collaboration: The role of place

Luigina Ciolfi, University of Limerick
Geraldine Fitzpatrick, University of Sussex
Liam Bannon, University of Limerick

Workshop 5 – Location-Awareness

Location-Awareness and Community

Natalia Marmasse, IBM
Vova Soroka, IBM
Quentin Jones, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Christine A. Halverson, IBM

Workshop 6 – Tangible

Tangible Interfaces for Collaboration

Eva Hornecker, University of Sussex
Mark Stringer, University of Sussex
Albrecht Schmidt, University of Munich
Brygg Ullmer, Louisiana State University

Workshop 7 – Appropriation

Supporting Appropriation Work: Approaches for the ‘reflective’ user

Yvonne Dittrich, IT University Copenhagen
Paul Dourish, University of California at Irvine
Anders Mørch, University of Oslo
Volkmar Pipek, IISI
Gunnar Stevens, University of Siegen
Bettina Törpel, Technical University of Denmark

Workshop 8 – e-Science

e-Science in Practice: Studying and Supporting Distributed Scientific Work for Transparent Interaction

mc schraefel, University of Southampton
Mike Fraser, University of Bristol
Marina Jirotka, University of Oxford
Susanne Bødker
professor, dr. scient.
Department of Computer Science
University of Aarhus
Aabogade 34, DK-8200 Aarhus N
+4589425630, fax +4589425601