Copyright ©Tatar 2006
Sometimes people ask still me about the Colab project, a seminal Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) technology. Colab was one of the first meeting support systems. It was a primarily intended to support small group work in a face-to-face context, although at the time, the hope was for a seamless transition between synchronous and asynchronous, group and solo work. Daniel Bobrow and Mark Stefik were the main visionaries on this project, following in Englebart's tradition of human augmentation.
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Although the work is old, it is sometimes still cited because both the promise (well represented at **) and the socio-technical challenges (uniquely represented at **) are still with us.
My experience working with Colab led me to doctoral work on attentional engagement, the basic and profound psychology underlying the technological challenges it presented. An underlying question is not just how people come to know what others are talking about (e.g. maintain common ground) but also how they create and maintain attentional engagement with one another in the course of collaboration.
The utility of a CSCW system can change radically based on small differences in user expectations with respect to attentional engagement. My current work on loosely coupled architecture for classroom connectivity (Tuples) inherits directly from the Colab project. This work is tied to current widespread inquiry in pervasive and ubiquitous computing.