Design Philosophy

Documents are often the goal of collaboration or the main shared information space for collaboration. Increasingly, these documents are highly structured and shared over a network. In a situation where tens or hundreds of people are working on a proposal or a policy statement, or some other inherently group document, it makes a lot of sense to have the system let teammates know what had been done, or address mail about a change, or to let others know what the work schedule is. CASCADE, Computer Augmented Support for Collaborative Authoring and Document Editing, explores ways to improve the quality of document centered collaboration--be it authoring standards, developing strategic plans, or reviewing proposals and plans. CASCADE allows groups to work together writing, revising, commenting and discussing documents. While CASCADE is currently optimized for commenting and document review, the basic infratructure supports any document centric process. At its core, CASCADE provides augmented processes that make it easier to work on complex electronic documents. CASCADE provides three kinds of supports for collaborative authoring.

• Augmentation. From the set of identifiable document processes[51,10], tasks exist where only a small portion of the subtasks require cognitive processing. In CASCADE, the task is so structured as to offload the mechanical tasks to the computer. For example, making a hypertext comment requires 10-15 actions (depending on how the process is defined). Only one of these tasks, writing the comment itself, actually requires the commenter--the rest can be done by the system. ``Augmentation'', as used by Engelbart[25,24,26,23,22,21], involves task analysis and redesign to create a set of processes that optimize the human side of the human computer interaction. CASCADE augments comment and comment review processes already. Research will augment additional document related processes.

• Information Utilization. Zuboff[66] uses the term ``informating'' to refer to a process where an information stream generated by a computer is used to improve the process. CASCADE uses information about documents, groups, and actions to inform simple functions. For example, sending mail begins with the subject, recipient, and originator fields of a mail note filled in. CASCADE knows the email addresses, and how group members like to receive their mail. Clicking one button attaches the document. The user simply types the note and the document is off. We call this kind of redesign ``information'' in the Zuboffian sense of the term as a direct parallel to ``automation''.

• Substitution. There are many things that we would like others to do for us. With advances in computing power and techniques, it is increasingly possible to design simple software programs (agents) that appear to be intelligent -- and in some cases the learning algorithms and control logic merit that title. In CASCADE, the current plan for agent design focuses on simple ``contribution'' agents that do little tasks on behalf of the user. For example, the communication agent keeps track of where people ``live'' when they are using CASCADE. Knowing that, the agent can go check those places when someone wants to contact them. The CASCADE communication agent does just this. It keeps track of who a user wants to talk to and watches for them. When found, it let's the user know, and if the timing is still right, sets up an interactive talk session. We call this kind of redesign ``substitution'' in the sense that the agent undertakes some well defined task on behalf of the users and substitutes its effort for the users.

In addition, visualizations of data sets can increase the speed with which targets of opportunity can be addressed[6,13,29,30,14,5,2]. CASCADE has a set of visual navigation tools that increase the speed with which sets of documents, document components, and areas within documents can be accessed. Current research is aimed at assessing the utility of these tools contrasted against other mechanisms for accessing particular documents[43,9,40]. Apart from navigational tools, CASCADE provides visualization tools, that augment activity analysis, tracking and reporting on various forms of activity in a way that supports different views, and controls access to a large complex document set.