One of our objectives in coordinating this year's Group Support System (GSS) mini-track was to encourage a wide range of papers that touched on a variety of important issues. As in the past, we used a strong reviewing process all papers were sent to at least three, sometimes four, reviewers. Our reviewers included scholars, practitioners, and developers, social psychologists, computer scientist...

Distributed group support systems are likely to be widely used in the future as a means for dispersed groups of people to work together through computer networks. They combine the characteristics of computer-mediated communication systems with the specialized tools and processes developed in the context of group decision support systems, to provide communications, a group memory, and tools and ...

Despite a steadily growing industry of third party providers, IT organizations to date have ventured rather cautiously into this new area of IT function delivery. This paper attempts to explain why this is so by examining the decision behavior and practices of a number of leading edge organizations. From this analysis, four key decision criteria were identified: flexibility, control, knowledge ...

Contingency models proposed for group support systems suggest that task, technology, group and individual characteristics may explain observed effects. Task, technology and group characteristics have been studied to some extent. Characteristics of individual participants have received less attention. In this article, the results of an experimental study on the equality of reticence in groups on...