It is all too easy to think of real time conferencing as a replacement for the formal, scheduled meeting. Work is fundamentally a social process, with many interactions required for people to initiate and coordinate their collaborations. In our office settings, this is often over coffee or lunch, in hallways, or by one person going to another's office for a brief conversation. When people are geographically distributed, the bottleneck to rich spontaneous interactions is distance. Quite simply, there is little chance of bumping into one another, and its too much work to track someone down for a quick chat, or to fight the battle of telephone tag.
Computer technology has potential to bring distance-separated people into contact.
Through the information highway, we can find out who is around, and whether they are available for conversation. We can also use it to establish real time communications at low personal cost. Just as electronic mail encourages informal messages, so can an easy to establish real-time link encourage informal meetings. If my rolodex is large, I can create personalized subsets of communities. For example, the display on the upper left shows a sub-group consisting of people at Calgary who are interested in our GroupLab project.