The social relationships in any collaborative research have an impact and when there is a solid personal rapport between collaboraters, then some problems may be avoided. CSCW have the potential to enable collaboration between people who have very fragile personal relations, so it is perhaps desirable that CSCW not only build in the usual management tools for task completion, but also some kind of equivalent coffee break time (for lack of a better term). Video conferencing can serve such a purpose, though in my experience video conferencing starts to become a bit of a nuisance if the rapport with the collaborater is good-- in those cases an audio line to the collaborater/s while we all focus on a common set of documents on our computers is more effective.

I wonder if, as with Wikipedia, it is possible to co-opt existing opportunities for synchronous socialisation via the internet, like SecondLife. It is entirely possible to go for a drink in SecondLife with colleagues and if we take the example of those cyber ethnographers like Tom Boellstorf, we could have 'offices' on SecondLife in which we can have virtual meetings. I'm not suggesting that the real virtuality be too pervasive in CSCW, but that we should recognise that collaboration with a stranger is difficult, AND that there are various ways of replicating online the kinds of social ice breaker activities that one would do face to face.

--Steve Lyon 18-Jun-2007 16:34 BST