INFO 447 - L14 - February 18, 2005 - aka THE BORING CLASS
Notes by: Egaas, Prins, Horm, Fortier,Serim

The Multiple Views of Inter-organizational Authoring

Collaborative Authoring
    - Wide range of studies
        * Very active up to the mid 1990's
            > Died around 1995
        * Systems development
            > A lot of good system studies (ShrEdit)
        * Lab Study
        * Field Trials
        * Field Study
        * Surveys

Collaborative Authoring: Changes
    - Better Infrastructure
        * Shared file systems, web servers, WebDAV, email attachments
    - Better communication
        * Instant Messaging (IM), presence, email
    - Better Application Sharing
        * NetMeeting, WebEx

Collaborative Authoring: Changes
    - Technical changes enable...
        * Wider geographic distribution
        * More participants
            - Competing/conflicting goals
        * Workflow assistance
        * Better awareness
    - Draft passing is still predominant :(

Study Focus
    - Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG)
        * Develop/write clinical cancer research protocols
        * Not quite meeting the requirements of their charter
    - SWOG Management
        * Improve protocol authoring in SWOG
        * Better control of process -> better production

Differentiation
    - Contrasting this work to prior studies
    - Longer term collaboration
        * Average length > 6 months
    - Number of collaborators
        * Often 6-12 people
    - Level of complexity
        * Multi-disciplinary
        * Document length longer
        * Differing organizational affiliation
        * Dependencies

Quick Outline
    - Collaborative Authoring
    - Study Focus
    - Background
    - Process Conceptions
    - Reflections
    - Future Directions

/** Note break while he talks about clinical protocols  **/

Loosely Coupled versus Tightly Collaboration
    - Relationship between two people in a workgroup

Specific Problems
    - Tools
        * The struggle with MS Word
            - Track changes, merge
    - Document management
        * Paper based version control
    - Awareness & coordination
        * Email is overloaded
            - Event notification, messaging, document sharing

Future Work
    - Continuing with SWOG
        * System development
            - Chunhua Weng's Thesis (collaborator)
        * Evaluation
            - A challenge - can't do a full adoption study
    - NCI plans to deploy a tool
    - Exploring other technical writing areas
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