There has been a significantly positive response to our MIS Collaboratory from academics and professionals from all over the world. Responses range from private email to postings on the system. The users of the Collaboratory have been unanimous regarding the need to bring together not only features of the Internet tools but also relevant information and documents. A noteworthy observation was the global nature of interactions on the Collaboratory. For example, more than 25% of the discussions were initiated by users from countries other than the United States, apart from the responses to issues raised here.
As more users joined the forum, there were many requests for additional features. One such important feature was to ``preview'' postings. The need for this capability can be better understood by analyzing features of the browsers and Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) itself. Since the system allows embedded links, inline images and other URLs, the posting itself has to contain tags for such links. Since HTML is a markup language with tags, it is easy to make mistakes; therefore a mechanism for testing the links and previewing the formatted document is needed to ensure that the administrator will not have to correct syntax errors. This was done by filtering the posting to a temporary buffer before actually writing it to the server.
An alternative to the above approach would have been to allow users to edit their comments directly. This would require maintaining a database, so that only the original user could alter his/her posts. At this point, we deemed this to be unnecessary, as it would add to the complexity of the system and might hinder a first time user from experimenting with the system. However, if we had to customize the Collaboratory for a specific organization, a database environment would be essential. If an organization prefers to conduct its internal meetings and discussions over a Collaboratory, then separate databases would be maintained to handle such discussions with privacy protection and restricted access. The extensions such a system can take are remarkable. For example, we created an announcement system for group interactions of an MBA level class. This allowed students not only to read announcements from the professor, but also enabled them to share information (such as recruitment schedules) with other students by automatically posting to the announcements page.
From our experience, we found that inline images and embedded links were popular only with Web-savvy users, who were already familiar with HTML tags. The primary reason could be the absence of integrated tools like a browser and an editor which supports a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) environment. With browsers gaining popularity, it should be possible to create a true word-processing type of environment that would eliminate the need to know the markup language on part of the end users. Another significant issue in our implementation is the organization of discussion or rather the need thereof. As the number of issues being discussed grew over time, the need to organize the discussions based on semantic criteria became more apparent. At present, the discussions are arranged simply by their subject along the lines of Internet newsgroups.
To better understand the needs of the Forum users, we conducted a Web based survey where the users were requested to answer questions on their general Internet usage and opinions on the MIS Forum. We present some preliminary summary statistics of user profiles and opinions, without analyzing causal relationships between the Collaboratory design factors and user value. A sequel paper will report a detailed analysis of such relationships. A profile of the 126 users who responded to our survey shows a mix of academics (4.8%), students (32.8%) and professionals (58.4%). 36.8% of the respondents have been using the Internet for 0-1 year, 28.0% for 1-2 years, 14.4% for 2-3 years, 11.2% for 3-4 years, while 9.6% said that they have been using the Internet for more than 5 years. It was also evident that more people are using the Internet for work-related activities. For example, 37.6% said that they used it ``often'', while 33.6% indicated that they used the Internet ``very often'' for work. In general, the profile of the respondents who used our forum was representative of the sample we wished to test, i.e., a mix of academics, students and professionals, who are not necessarily Internet experts, but who have begun to use the Internet for work related activities. Since our focus is on interactions for the purpose of advancing knowledge and practice in a discipline, casual surfers on the net and those who use it purely for entertainment purposes are not of particular interest to us.
While 40.8% of the respondents felt that our Forum was ``somewhat''
of an effective medium to discuss MIS issues, 35% were of the opinion
that the Forum was ``quite a bit'' or ``very much'' an effective
medium for collaboration
. However, when
we asked the respondents to compare our Forum with Usenet newsgroups
as a potentially constructive platform for interactions regarding MIS
issues, 56.8% rated our Forum as ``quite a bit'' or ``very much''
better. It is interesting to examine what existing and planned
features of the Forum the respondents considered useful. 63.2% and
65.6% of the respondents indicated that the ability to post
issues and comments automatically from any browser and the
ability to link to documents respectively were ``quite a bit'' to
``very important'' features of our Forum. These features enable
interactive and document-centric discussions on our Forum. The
respondents were not particularly enthusiastic about the ability to
embed voice and images in their comments (e.g., 30.4% thought it was
only ``somewhat important'' to embed images, while 48.0% indicated it
was ``not very much'' to ``somewhat important'' to annotate with
voice). We may infer that the importance of multimedia capabilities
such as voice and images are influenced by other factors such as
available bandwidth, domain of discussion, and the nature of
collaboration. For example, one user commented ``too much graphics,
my modem cannot handle'', thereby indicating a bandwidth
constraint. It may also be reasonable to assume that a Collaboratory
for a discipline like Biology might see more use of pictures than the
field of MIS.
For future enhancements to the Forum, it was clear that a search capability similar to that offered by a relational database was very much needed. 65.6% of the respondents felt that this was an important feature and would increase the value of our Forum. Also, 60.8% felt that there was a need for discussion management, while 60% felt the ability to vote on issues was ``somewhat'' to ``quite a bit'' important. These are clearly some directions to be pursued in terms of enhancing the Collaboratory. Only 8% saw the need to integrate synchronous conferencing tools like MBONE, Cu-SeeMe with the Forum.