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.