Apart from information access, another major purpose of using a Collaboratory is meaningful interactions with other members of the profession, to debate issues and problems of importance and interest, to gain new insights relating to research, practice, and education. We define interaction richness as the extent to which we can overcome the barriers of space, time and media/document formats in interacting with others. This would include:
- Ability to talk, see, write and draw in both synchronous and asynchronous manner
- Access relevant reference information
- Archiving interactions for future review
- Debate issues, problems, ideas, articles, etc. in open public forums on a global basis
The assumption of face-to-face-meeting capabilities of a Collaboratory having a positive impact on user value may seem questionable at a first glance. For example, a considerable section of the literature on GDSS supports the notion that anonymity of interactions can help shy reticent group members participate more freely (e.g., see Valacich et al. [17]) for a related discussion and a review of the relevant literature). In other words, a GDSS which emulates a face-to-face interaction may even lead to undesirable outcomes. While it is possible to customize a Collaboratory for a specific organization for its employees to engage in brainstorming and group activities, we envision a Collaboratory more as a global platform where people with common interests in a field can interact to enhance knowledge and practice within the discipline. Whether a feature like anonymity has a positive or negative impact on the interaction outcomes is an empirical issue, the answer to which really depends on the context of use. However, having features which provide a face-to-face interaction capability, and then selecting only a subset of features depending on the context of interaction will not negatively affect the outcomes. For example, if a research article is being reviewed electronically through the Collaboratory, it may be necessary to mask the identity of the author(s), depending on the guidelines set forth for the review process.
What are the design features which can provide this level of interaction richness? We suggest that interaction richness is affected by dynamic linking capability, synchronous and asynchronous communication, multimedia support, and interaction management.
Dynamic linking capability
Dynamic linking capability is critical to support interactions based on sound arguments, rationale and empirical or anecdotal evidence. For example, in a discussion of client/server effectiveness on an electronic forum, a user may take a position that client/server allows better integration of diverse computing platforms than a mainframe environment. On an ideal electronic forum (a part of the Collaboratory), the user will be able to create links to documents on the Internet to support his/her stand on the issue or to counter someone else's claim. That is, the user will embed a Universal Resource Locator (URL), Gopher or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) link to some relevant articles, comments or cases (located somewhere on the Internet) within his/her posting about the issue of integration in a client server environment.
Asynchronous and synchronous communication
While the Web does not support real time interactions, and has been primarily used for disseminating information (by storing documents on Web servers), the ability to interact in both asynchronous and synchronous modes should be an integral part of a Collaboratory. While GDSS and CSCW systems achieve this capability within a small geographical region (e.g., on a local area network), such features have to be developed on a global basis. It should be noted that while other Internet applications such as Newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) provide the asynchronous and synchronous communication capabilities respectively, they do not support multimedia or hypertext linking capabilities like the Web.
Multimedia support
A Collaboratory should be able to provide full multimedia capabilities to support a wide variety of documents and interactions among users. While the Web does support multimedia documents, the challenge is to bring the same capabilities to a global interactive forum. Of course, the relative importance of multimedia support will vary by the discipline of interest. For example, ability to handle high quality images may be more critical in fields such as Astronomy and Biology than in MIS.
Interaction management
Collaboratories must provide mechanisms to manage interactions in an orderly fashion. For example, if a working paper is put up for discussion, and if users make comments and suggestions, their inputs will be less meaningful in the absence of a way to organize such interactions. If the comments are organized according to their position on the central theme and the methodology of the paper, a new user will find it relatively easy to know what others think about the article. Similarly, the article itself could have been written in a structured form, whereby the authors clearly state their stand on an issue and provide empirical or analytical support for their position. Without such explicit mechanisms for managing discussions and argumentation, it may be impossible to obtain the full benefits that a Collaboratory may offer.
It is also important to be able to link related issues and ideas discussed on a Collaboratory. As the number of discussions grows, this feature will allow a user focusing on one discussion to examine comments and viewpoints that have been expressed on a related topic. It calls for a database environment which can link related discussions, and dynamically reorganize such links based on certain semantic criteria. Note that this linking involves automatic creation of links between topics or issues of discussion based system specified rules. This is different from Collaboratory users embedding links within their comments or postings.