Computer Support for Distributed Collaborative Writing: A Coordination Science Perspective

The goal of our research is to provide computer support for distributed collaborative writing. Writers can be said to be distributed when they have distributed knowledge and skill, and they share that knowledge and skill in order to develop a draft; or, even when they have significant overlap in knowledge and skill, they distribute the work of producing the draft itself among them. But in this sense, all collaborative writing is distributed. In the sense we will use the term here, distributed collaborative writing refers to, additionally, situations in which the writers are distributed in time (i.e., they do not work on the artifact at the same time) or place (i.e., they do not meet face-to-face). The central research questions in distributed collaborative writing are "What does the process of producing a written product look like when it is divided among writers who coordinate to produce it over time and space?" and "What is the relationship of these processes to success?" When the process includes "active agents," the scope of the first question shifts slightly to include not only people, but computers as well. This question is, of course, the central question of "distributed cognition" or "coordination science," applied to collaborative writing. In analogy with the way cognitive scientists (psychologists, AI researchers, etc.) are interested in identifying strategies and representations involved in individual cognition, coordination scientists are interested in identifying the strategies and representations that groups of "agents"--people and computers--use to coordinate their activities (Malone, 1988).