ABSTRACT
The participants in a joint activity must work hard to maintain coordination. For complicated and/or novel activities, even more talk is needed to proceed. Over time, for recurrent cooperative behaviors, the participants will organize their talk as a means of organizing their actions. The main work of this talk is to explore the ramifications of, and methodology for, introducing coordinating representations into same-time/different-place computer-mediated cooperative activities. Groupware facilitates communication, coordination, and collaboration of group effort. Building a groupware system requires a detailed analysis of the work environment in which it will be deployed and extensive work on designing both the interface as it presents itself to the individual user and the mediated interaction among the users. Where a shared virtual whiteboard is an external media that can be used to support all kinds of social interaction, a coordinating representation is one kind of content realized in an external media.
