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CSCW
2004
ACM

The multiple views of inter-organizational authoring

13 years 9 months ago
The multiple views of inter-organizational authoring
Collaborative authoring is a common workplace task. Yet, despite improvements in word processors, communication software, and file sharing, many problems continue to plague co-authors. We conducted a qualitative study in a setting where participants are loosely connected, physically separated, and work together over a period of 4-9 months to author a complex technical document—a clinical trial protocol. Our study differs from most prior work in that the collaboration is longer-lived, and that the collaborators do not share equivalent status, background, nor domains of expertise. Our data demonstrates that the participants do not share the same view or representation of the authoring process, even though it has a long organizational history. Nonetheless, the participants can still coordinate their activity while maintaining only partially consistent representations of what they are doing. We contend that partial consistency in the participants’ concept of the collaborative process ...
David W. McDonald, Chunhua Weng, John H. Gennari
Added 30 Jun 2010
Updated 30 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where CSCW
Authors David W. McDonald, Chunhua Weng, John H. Gennari
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