Working group 1 report

Working group one focused on problems associated with the use of distributed applications. Initially several possible topics of discussion were considered including the growth of the world wide web (WWW), problems of lag across networks, the high resource requirements of particular tasks in distributed collaboration and the impact on current theories and techniques for design and modelling. The focus was on looking at ways that the use of distributed applications could be improved, especially in the light of new developments in both technology and cognitive science. The group decided that a concrete example would allow the discussion to proceed in an appropriate context. Figure 1 shows a representation of a group of people collaborating over a network. P1 and P2 are connected by a high speed network link and P3 is connected by a slow speed network link. Two initial problems identiied were fragmented communication and lack of update consistency. Fragmented communication occurs when one of the users on the high speed link (P1) tries to communicate on a channel that is not quickly received by the slow speed user (P3), for example, gesturing (e.g. circling an object) in a shared working space with the mouse pointer. P2 may see and understand the gesture and continue communicating with P1. However, P3 has not seen the gesture and has therefore lost part of the communication. If P1 and P2 are unaware that P3 has not seen the gesture then they may continue communicating and eeectively cut P3 out of the collaboration.