The role of SIGOIS in CSCW

CHI has long dealt with the tensions of people in psychology misunderstanding th e paradigms of the computer scientists and people in computer science misunderstanding th e paradigms of the people in the psychological sciences . This tension has been the community's strength . People have been dragged kicking and screaming to the fountain o f learning about other fields . This same sharing (however painful) is needed even more fo r the CSCW field where the contributing sciences are even more disparate . SIGOIS is a very technical SIG interested in system architectures to support CSCW and in models o f coordination . It holds its own conference which doesn't share in the richness of th e anthropological and social science contributions Similarly, the current instantiation o f CSCW is biased toward the social sciences with not enough consideration of how hard it i s to build the underlying systems that support their recommendations or of the fact tha t computer science theory is being built as these problems are tackled .