Working Apart Together : Foundations for Component Groupware

Despite its promise to support cooperative work, groupware often fails to live up to its promise in day-to-day settings, due to a lack of integration between various types of groupware tools.

In my talk, I will present the foundations for component groupware, a new generation of groupware systems that allows users to pick and mix the right groupware tools for a cooperative job. I will describe how to structure designs of groupware systems as well-integrated compositions of grouplets, which are small groupware tools that each support a part of cooperative work. In addition, I will show how grouplets can be implemented on to of platforms that have been built to facilitate the development of component groupware.

A bit more in detail: in my talk, I will

• give a short intro about my visiting research at UNC-CH and the Telematica Instituut, the Netherlands.
• introduce the MESH project (10 min.), including video that shows what ordinary users can do with the collaborative multimedia applications provided by MESH

Other elements of my talk may include an overview of (and in-depth coverage of, depending on time available and interest of the audience):

• why component groupware, why "working apart together"
• the Conference-Media-Coordination (CoMeCo) reference architecture for component groupware
• Collaborative compound document editing; a new paradigm for collaborative document editing that illustrates the power of component groupware.
• the Collaborative Object Groups programming pattern: providing replication and consistency transparency to programmers of collaborative systems
• the design of a CORBA platform that supports collaborative object groups (and thoughts about how to do this in the Java domain)
• ordered message delivery in collaborative systems

After the talk, I will give a demonstration of CoCoTree, a collaborative compound document editing prototype.

About the speaker:

G. Henri ter Hofte has been a researcher at the Telematica Instituut, the Netherlands since 1993. His research activities include CSCW, groupware and distributed object computing.
He received his cum laude master's degree from the University of Twente in the Netherlands in 1993, where he graduated on distibution aspects of graphical user interface software. After he joined the Telematica Instiuut in 1993, he contributed to the design and implementation of groupware systems and platforms in the research projects Platinum and Mesh and conceived the collaborative compound document editing paradigm. He authored several papers in international conferences and edited the proceedings of the international workshop OOGP'97 on Object Oriented Groupware Platforms.
In 1998, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Twente in the Netherlands on the dissertation entitled "Working Apart Together : Foundations for Component Groupware".

Currently, he is working as a PostDoc at the Department of Computer Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Collaboration Bus project.