The Sharing of Perspectives by Means of Negotiation

Collaborative work typically involves both individual and group activities. Individual efforts may be combined through group negotiation processes. Personal perspectives on shared information are thereby intertwined and merged into group understanding. Computer support for personal and group perspectives allows people to view and work on a shared information repository in different contexts. The challenge for perspective mechanisms is how to manage the merging of results from individual perspectives into a consensus. Computer support for negotiation addresses the problem of merging individual results through voting and discussion. The challenge for negotiation mechanisms is how to allow work to continue while issues are being negotiated. WEBGUIDE is a software prototype that combines support for perspectives and negotiation so that individual results can be systematically merged while work continues within personal perspectives. A WEBGUIDE interface has been designed in detail to work out the many issues involved in intertwining perspectives and negotiation mechanisms. The application domain for illustrating WEBGUIDE is the support of web research by teams of middle school students. The WEBGUIDE system makes explicit and scaffolds for these students the structure of web research, team collaboration, personal perspectives, and group negotiation that they may be experiencing for the first time in their lives.