"How do you know" in CSCW and Virtual Enterprise Research? The topic of
Evaluation in Information Systems, Information Research, CSCW, Virtual
Enterprises, etc appears to be highly fragmented. Some attempts have been
made to "bridge the gap" - e.g. in the series of workshops on Evaluation at
WETICE over the past four years. Yet there remains very considerable
fragmentation, and concern expressed that a high proportion of CSCW
implementations lack rigorous evaluation.
WETICE originated very much as a cross-disciplinary series of working
conferences, under the auspices of IEEE Computer Society. There still
seems to be a problem that (for example) engineers, computer scientists,
information systems researchers and human factors people don't communicate
a lot about evaluation, and we think that this must hinder the
effectiveness of all research in these fields.
Seeking to promote interdisciplinary discussion on how to achieve
rigorous evaluation in the field of collaborative information systems and
virtual enterprises, the fourth WETICE workshop on evaluation will be held
in Linz, Austria, in June 2003. The WETICE format provides opportunity
for extensive discussion of issues, by contrast with many conventional
conferences, and papers are published in post-proceedings by IEEE. We hope
also to edit a Special Issue of the journal Logistics Information
Management, based on the accumulated wisdom of the series of four
evaluation workshops to date. We hope also to have a cross-disciplinary
expert discussion panel on the second day.
The deadline for papers for WETICE 2003 is March 17th. The full call for
the Evaluation workshop can be found at
http://www.raed.org.uk/wetice-evaluation
The main WETICE 2003 website is at
http://netserver.cerc.wvu.edu/wetice03
Hoping to receive your submissions, and to see you in Linz!
Julian Newman
Elaine Raybourn
Pi-Hsuan (Josie) Huang
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