The World Wide Web (WWW) is used by millions of people every day, but little support is offered for people to work together. Most CSCW systems assume a relatively high-performance local area network for broadcasting information between collaborating users. Due to the large number of WWW users it would be useful to incorporate CSCW features into a WWW Browser and Server.
As part of my Masters project I investigated the usefulness of a Web browser for features to support group work. I prototyped W4 in GroupKit (a Tcl/Tk based toolkit for Groupware programming). My project supervisor is Dr. John Grundy
My browser currently allowed widgets to be embedded in html, or added to the Web page as you go. The Widgets I supported were: Whiteboard, Textchat, Brainstorm, URL-Link, Sticky Notes and Textedit. Multiple instances of Whiteboards, Textchats, Brainstorms, and Textedits could be run concurrently on different pages. The whiteboard could have sticky notes and URL-Link's added to it, but ideally it should have been able to accept a whole lot of other applets too. Users could also follow other users around (within a page, and across urls). I intended to make applets only accessible to certain groups of users (if desired), but couldn't be bothered implementing it. This would mean that a textchat may belong to a group and follow that group around through different urls. I also had a 'Shared Bookmarks' list (an idea I got from Tom Gross), which is shared between all users. Users could also have there own personal (non shared) bookmark lists. Support was also provided for users to leave the conference and rejoin again, inform them of new notes, urls in the 'Shared Bookmarks' list unvisted and who knows what else. I also added support for anonymous ftp (well, sort of anyway), email, gopher and news. These all functioned just like you would expect a research prototype to function (i.e. they vaguely worked).
I envisaged setting up rooms, which would be a shared (or private) workspace for users, but have flagged this away for now. A room would have a whiteboard as a background and allow other widgets to be added to it. With rooms will also come security, an issue that is very important when many users are involved.
The last thing I did was to add a WebNet (developed by Steve Jones and Andy Cockburn) like interface to my browser. I developed their approach to an extent, and built on top of it. It provides a higher-level approach to W4. It visualises where users have been and how they got there, and also how many times a particular path has been taken to a url. Further work would involve prototyping a few more features, doing some more tests, and designing W4 to be used with a real browser/server (eg. Netscape). This may be as Java applets or as Plug-ins.
I also conducted some experiments to determine the usefulness of the browser.
If you've got any queries let be know
Gianoutsos, S. "W4: A World Wide Web Browser with CSCW support" To appear in Proceedings of OzCHI'96, Hamilton, New Zealand, November 1996. HTML, Postscript
Gianoutsos, S. and Grundy, J. "Qualitative Evaluation of a Collaborative Web Browser" To appear in proceedings of OzCHI'96, Hamilton, New Zealand, November 1996. HTML, Postscript
Gianoutsos, S. and Grundy, J. "Cooperative work with the World Wide Web: Adding CSCW support to a Web browser", In Proceedings of Oz-CSCW96, Brisbane, Australia, August 1996. HTML, Postscript
