Although this would work as well as a room for collecting and sharing the group's work documents, a shared folder does not provide additional tools such as whiteboards and URL pointers, and it does not invite users to personalize their space the way the virtual room does. In addition, when the CVW user drops by a CVW room to drop off or pick up information, there's a good chance there will be other users there, and any ensuing conversation among the users who encounter each other may help build community and further the group's collaborative work. Control of a group's rooms can be turned over to one or more group members, and the group can choose to restrict access to rooms when they want to keep documents or conversations private, and to open them to the public when they want to share information with members of other groups. Some groups have two rooms, one for private conferences and documents, and one that is open to the public. Our design decisions have been whenever possible to leave the users the largest number of choices, the largest amount of room available to make social agreements rather than to be controlled by the computing environment.
Some simple examples follow.
Sometimes users are concerned that people will make copies of their documents, and that it will be impossible to find all the copies of a document when they want to be sure it's gone. So rather than remove or restrict convenient copying features, we invite users with copy-control problems to work out among group members ways to deal with sensitive materials. For example, users may agree that they will exchange sensitive documents by passing them from group member to group member rather than dropping them in rooms. Or they may lock their room in order to keep others from accessing those documents. And they may then agree among themselves that they will not make extra copies of these documents.