Collaboration as a second thought

Collaboration is often an afterthought to a project or development. In this paper we describe and analyze our experiences in developing collaborative technologies, most often involving the sharing of visual information. We have often developed these in a context that required us to retrofit existing analysis applications with collaboration capabilities. This approach, though fruitful, is time-consuming, expensive, and often difficult to re-apply elsewhere - it is just hard to change an existing application. One way to make such an effort easier is to package the collaborative components as a kit that can be leveraged on a case-by-case basis. The fixed interface provided by a well-designed toolkit eases the integration process by providing an unchanging and familiar set of components to deploy. Better still, we find, are approaches that require no modification of applications while providing rich and powerful means for sharing information with collaborators. We discuss three separate and illuminating examples that meet this criterion in different ways: (1) building the collaborative potential into the underlying abstractions on which operating systems are built, (2) building tools that live side-by-side with any application in the context provided by the operating system, or by (3) building information tools that use collaborative modalities to better integrate with our workflow. These are probably not the only options, but they all derive from an approach where collaboration is considered early in the design process and therefore manifests itself deep in the computing infrastructure giving it a wider cast.