Austria From CSCW over CWE to CE: The Evolution of Needs and Tools MATES Revisited

Meetings, owning a central role in engineering projects, are the major way of performing the information exchange necessary for other engineers to make progress in their mutually depending tasks. They also play a central role in getting consensus and in achieving quality. However, when project members are not colocated this works less well. Travelling, standard remedy for this, is not an acceptable solution in the long run. Besides direct travel expenses, even greater cost are caused by wasting human time and energy due to commuting-like work situations. A solution must be “well integrated” and easily accessible in daily working situations. Current alternatives, like TV conferences in separate studios, still require co-location, scheduling, and disconnect people from usual working contexts. It must instead be light-weight and conveniently available, providing a media for the fine network of human interaction, the driving force in complex problem solving. Improving the efficiency of collaboration processes is the most promising way of increasing productivity in knowledge intensive projects. Primarily, easy-to-use means for interaction between people and between people and information, independent of place and time, are to be provided. The area of distributed information multimedia, groupware and CSCW is addressing this need. Quote from “The Euro-presence White Paper”, D. Schefström, CDT/Luleå, Sweden (1995)