CSCI-7212 Homework assignment 3

Tomohiro Oda

1. which "collaborative technologies" do you know about?

Swiki, Zope, Dynasite, LivingOM

E-mail, netnews, BBS's

cvs, Bob's super swiki, Nebraska(Screen sharing mechanism on Squeak)

2. which "collaborative technologies" have you used?

All of the above

3. discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the "collaborative technology" which you do know best?

Strength:

(1) It has already been widely used.

(2) Clients can provide different UIs, e.g. threads and folders, so that users can choose a suitable UI by situations.

(3) Mailing lists are scalable to number of users.

Weakness:

(1) Computer virus

(2) E-mail systems do not guarantee delivery

(3) I don't know any E-mail client which supports co-authoring

4. can you think of any theories, conceptual frameworks, specifications which would guide you in developing "collaborative technology"?

I don't know any concrete theory. However, I don't think there exists a single theory or framework which can guide us in any collaborative works because Software Engineering is typically a kind of collaborative work and there exists no comprehensively successful methodology.

have you ever read a book (or books) about collaboration?

No.

5. discuss the following statement: "collaborative technology will have little success in non-collaborative environments"

The statement is not always true. I think collaborative technologies can support integrating personal works at distributed environments into a single virtual workplace. For example, cvs is developed to support collaborative software developments and it enables me to have virtually one workplace on 3 PCs at different places(school, home, company office). I also used Nebraska to access from my home to Smalltalk program running at school.