Component technologies are perceived as an important means to keep software architectures flexible. Flexibility offered by componenttechnologies typically addresses software developers at design time. However, the design of software which should support socialsystems, such as work groups or...

Many IT design methodologies have been developed to guide professional designers towards aproduction of ‘good’ software that is useful to the users in the application fields addressed. But recentresearch has also stressed the creative activities of the users as an important part of...

The objective of this paper is the design of computer supported joint actionspaces. It is argued against a view of functionality as residing in computer applications. Insuch a view the creation of functionality is equivalent to the creation of computerapplications. Functionality, in the view...

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become an important factor in ourpersonal lives as well as in our social organizations—at work, at home, in our hospitals, in thepolitical institutions and in the public media. While in work settings the dynamics of sharedbusiness goals,...

In this chapter we depict collaborative aspects of tailoring software. We provide a categorization distinguishing between three levels of intensity of user ties regarding tools usage (“shared use”, “shared context”, and “shared tool”) and discuss approaches to support collaborative...

Classification schemes are an important issue in the collective use of large document collections. We have investigated the classification of technical documentations in two engineering domains: a steel mill and a sewerage plant company. In both cases we found a coexistence of different...

In fragmented work settings like networked organizations or virtual organizations, monolithic approaches to implement support for collaboration would require the actors involved to agree on the usage of the approach or tool under consideration. As the autonomy of actors in these settings makes...

The position paper reports on our experiences with building an Eclipse based BSCW client called BSCWeasel. The client opens new opportunities for using the BSCW system, which was developed as a web-based groupware solution providing coordination support concepts like Shared Workspaces, Awareness...

Many modern organizations can be seen as network organizations. Their participantsare individuals as well as organizations, they cooperate in distributed teams.Especially in knowledge-intensive domains (service engineering, consulting, etc.)project teams form with participants from very...

This contribution is a long-term study of the evolving use of the organization-widegroupware in a service network. We are describing the practices related to organization-wide groupwarein conjunction with local groupware-related practices and how they have proceeded since theorganization was...