Informal Abstract
Henri ter Hofte


I can talk about various subjects based on my Ph.D. work and my
participation in the MESH research project (CSCW applictions )
A provisional title for this talk could be "Working Apart Together :
Foundations for Component Groupware"; 

See my homepage at http://www.cs.unc.edu/~terhofte/ and my Ph.D thesis at
http://www.telin.nl/publicaties/1998/wat/wat.htm.

Some elements I would certainly like to include:
- short (5 min) intro about Telematica Instituut and my work at UNC
- introduction to the MESH project (10 min.), including video that shows
what ordinary users can do with the applications provided by MESH (need
hookup to video beamer + set of (computer) audio speakers; I'll bring my
notebook which stores the digital video)

Depending on your interests (or on your description of the audience), I
could mix various of the below subjects:
- why component groupware, why "working apart together"
- a formal generic model of groupware services
- the Conference-Media-Coordination (CoMeCo) reference architecture for
component groupware
- collaborative compound document editing; a new paradigm that illustrates
the power of component groupware
- demonstration of CoCoTree, a collaborative compound document editing
prototype (requires two Windows NT (4.0 SP3, I believe) machines linked
together throught TCP/IP; one of them preferably connected through beamer;
also requires 1 hr in advance setup time (incl. buffertime for problems)
- Collaborative Object Groups: providing replication and consistency
transparency to programmers of collaborative systems
- the design of an infrastructure that supports collaborative object groups
- ordered message delivery

As you see, I can talk about lots of stuff. Describing it all requires 3
hrs. So, I have to make a selection; please tell me more about the time I
have, the (expectations of) the audience or your preferences.

Kind Regards,
Henri