Tools for supporting the collaborative process

Abstract

Collaborative software has been divided into two temporal categories: synchronous and asynchronous. We argue that this binary distinction is unnecessary and harmful, and present a model for collaboration processes (i.e. the temporal record of the actions of the group members) which includes both synchronous and asynchronous software as submodels. We outline an object-oriented toolkit which implements the model, and present an application of its use in a pen-based conferencing tool.