ABSTRACT
Between 1985 and early 1988, a research project was conducted within the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to understand the needs of geographically distributed organizations and to build technology that would help distributed organizations function. To provide a testbed, one computer research organization at Xerox PARC was intentionally split between existing facilities in Palo Alto, California and new facilities in Portland, Oregon. A major goal of this exploratory effort was to force the twenty to twenty-five computer researchers in this organization to build and integrate technology to support collaboration over the distance between Palo Alto and Portland. The resulting technology was a combination of computer technology with always-available cross-site video and audio.
This chapter discusses the lab’s cross-site experience. To provide a backdrop for this discussion, the paper first describes the motivations, setting and technological support for this distributed organization experiment. The chapter then presents a discussion of the author’s and other lab members’ cross-site experiences.
