One of the most important instruments for advancing a relatively young field like MIS is an electronic forum for generating research ideas and stimulating debates involving researchers and practitioners. We saw the Web as a common ground for supporting discussions and providing pointers to existing information resources. The richness of the Web in terms of the data types can be exploited to the fullest by creating forums centered around the Web as opposed to other Internet discussion systems like the Newsgroups. Based on the theory of technology convergence and complementarity, we conceptualized an ideal public CSCW system on the Internet, which will allow person-to-person and group-to-group communication in a multi-media format. The relevant tasks involved in such a communication would include mailing, posting, and viewing rich documents, as shown in Figure 3.
The Internet supports many applications (e.g., Usenet, email, IRC,
Multi-User Dungeons (MUD), conferencing) for interaction among
users. However, each of these tools has existed in an isolated manner,
and typically users have had to access them separately. But for
productive interactions, it would be ideal to have an integrated
application which provides users all the above capabilities in a
seamless manner.
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