Network issues in the growth and adoption of networked CSCW services
Authors: Vertegaal Roel , Guest Steve 
Published: January 2007

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) environments have
traditionally made heavy use of network technology to allow users
(often at different locations) to work together via computer
systems. However, this dependency of CSCW applications on the
underlying network technology has up to now not been a real issue
within the community. CSCW research has traditionally focused on
the design of shared environment applications that run on this
underlying network, e.g., the development of interaction and
presentation techniques for shared tasks. Also, CSCW has been a
testbed for design methodologies such as the ethnographic analysis
of user behaviour. Although we support this emphasis on social
science within the field, we feel that in this truly
multidisciplinary area researchers should become more aware of
network-related research issues. A number of parallel events can be
identified that triggered our concern:

" The move from Local Area Network technology to Wide Area
Network technology (the global Internet) for CSCW applications.

" The evolution of this Internet towards commercialization of
services and the privatisation of many telecommunication service
providers in Europe.

" The political debate over the Information Super Highway,
necessary to support the increasing bandwidth requirements typical
for CSCW applications that require the use of multiple channels of
information.

The move towards the Internet has given us the opportunity for
global participation in CSCW environments, resulting in a more
generic utilization of this technology. However, the caveat for the
CSCW community lies in the fact that we now no longer fully control
our shared environments, and have become more dependent on the
global decision-making process regarding network infrastructure.
The same institution that gave our research community access to
internetworking in the late-1970s, the National Science Foundation
(NSF), has decided that further governmental funding of the NSFNET
backbone, which constituted a major part of Internet infrastructure
in the USA, is no longer required. Commercial service providers now
operate major backbone services for the Internet on a commercial
basis [8]. These commercial network providers thus take charge over
essential pieces of Internet infrastructure, taking decisions which
could have a serious impact on distributed multimedia services
provided by the Internet such as the World-Wide Web and MBONE,
which we'll discuss further on. In Europe, a similar development is
taking place: traditional, often monopoly-based, network providers
such as British Telecom and the Dutch PTT Telecom have recently
been privatised and are in the process of reconsidering their tasks
and services. The debate in both the USA and Europe over the
Information Super Highway or National Information Infrastructure
(NII) gives further evidence that governments will not be able to
maintain development and support of new high-bandwidth information
services in the near future.

This, however, is only one network-related development that
directly concerns the CSCW community. New standards are emerging
for the transmission of real-time high-bandwidth data over Internet
connections. This high-bandwidth data typically involve video and
audio information from shared multimedia communication
environments. In the next section, we will discuss what these
standards might provide in terms of functionality to the CSCW
community, and what constraints these standards introduce. They are
often defined by network researchers who have a genuine interest in
providing network capabilities, but typically do not have the same
means as the CSCW community to regard cognitive ergonomical aspects
of network functionality. We try to demonstrate the importance of a
dialogue between the two areas of research, a cross-fertilization
from which both communities will benefit.

The current attitude in the CSCW community towards connectivity
is very similar to the attitude towards computing power in the
field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the late 1970s: the
infrastructure necessary to apply our research ideas is not of our
concern, and will be delivered by others. That may have been true
for direct manipulation systems, but to what extend will it be true
for shared real-time multimedia environments?