Advance Program - Workshop

13. Electronic Communities: Places and Spaces, Contents and Boundaries

Monday, 08:30 - 17:00

Organizers
Michael J. Muller, Jessica Friedman, Lotus Development Corporation, USA

This workshop brings together four related areas of research and practice:

• Electronic communities in CSCW
• Communities of practice in management science
• Places and spaces as constructed venues for collaboration
• Boundaries and boundary objects as crucial areas for collaboration

The goal of the workshop is to increase the existing overlap among these four areas, to enrich their work through mutual education.

We ask participants to consider one or more of the following questions:

• How is the social and computing environment for a community (the attributes of its place or space) shaped or determined? What are the impacts upon different groups inside and outside of the community?
• How does the social and computing environment of a community affect what goes on within the community? What goes on at the boundary of the community?
• What work takes place within a community? What work takes place across boundaries? What work takes place at the boundary?
• To what extent are structures, resources, or persons within the community visible to community members? To outsiders? Can community members control these issues of visibility?

A detailed call for participation may be found at www.lotus.com/research.

Contact
Michael J. Muller
Lotus Development Group
55 Cambridge Parkway
Cambridge MA 02142 USA
Tel: +1-617-693-4235
Fax: +1-617-693-1407
Email: mullerm@acm.org or michael_muller@lotus.com