Call for Participation: ECSCW 2003, Workshop 6

From Good Practices to Patterns
Mining socio-technical patterns from experience with groupware

Organisation
Thomas Herrmann, Andrea Kienle, Gabriele Kunau
Universität Dortmund, Department of Computer Science, Informatics and
Society
Till Schümmer
FernUniversität in Hagen, Department of Computer Science, Distributed
Systems

Call
Since they were first described by the architect Christopher Alexander in
the 1970’s, patterns have become a widely accepted means to describe
proven solutions to recurring problems. The explicit goal of patterns is
to empower people to find and evaluate solutions in a field in which they
are no experts. Especially within the field of HCI there is a lively
community promoting the idea of patterns to convey and share best
practices. Websites and mailing lists publishing patterns according to
well established shepherding procedures show that many researchers are
actively involved in the creation and improvement of HCI-patterns.
Although HCI and CSCW spring from common roots, the CSCW-community seems
to be very hesitant to adopt the idea of patterns.

In our workshop we would like to gather experts of CSCW – depreciative of,
in favour of, or indifferent to the idea of patterns – and derive patterns
from material they bring in. This material should be based on experiences
made with groupware and address technical aspects such as the
configuration of cooperative systems as well as aspects related to the
organisation of computer supported cooperative work. After a presentation
and first discussion of the material, a short phase of theoretical input
follows; we then break up in groups to create patterns from the available
material. The experience of this active phase is then subject to further
discussion; the goal is to describe patterns – or even interrelated
patterns forming a pattern language – that would be valuable for CSCW
together with the conditions of their usage. Anybody interested in
participating is asked to submit the following:

1.
A prosaic description of best practices related to groupware. These
descriptions may but do not have to be written in the style of patterns.
They should be text-based, can include diagrams and should not exceed four
pages. While we are especially interested in the fields of CSCL, Joint
Editing, Awareness, Community Support, CVE, and Workflow, other areas of
CSCW research are also welcome.
2.
An additional brief position statement about the usefulness and possible
limitations of the pattern method for the development of CSCW-applications
may – but need not – be added. The statement should refer to the best
practice in its reasoning. The positions statements will be used during
the second discussion phase of the workshop.
3.
For the workshop we ask the participants to also bring in large posters
(DIN A0) on which the main points of their best practice are presented.

Dates
Deadline for submission: July 1st 2003;
Notification of acceptance: July 14th;
Optional shepherding process of submitted material: July 15th - August
15th 2003.

Contact
Please address all inputs as well as any requests to:
[log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]

We have also created a workshop-website for further information:
http://www.groupware-patterns.org/ecscw2003

--
Dipl. Inform. Gabriele Kunau

Universität Dortmund * Fachbereich Informatik *  Lehrstuhl VI * Informatik
& Gesellschaft *
D- 44221 Dortmund * Campus Süd * Geschossbau V * Zimmer 412

Tel.: 0231 / 7 55 - 2012 * Fax : 0231 / 7 55 - 24 05 * E-Mail:
[log in to unmask]

www  : http://iundg.cs.uni-dortmund.de/