Social Conventions and Issues of Space for Distributed Collaboration

We followed the work of an international research network that holds regular meetings in technology-enhanced environments. The team is geographically distributed and to support its collaborative work it uses a set of technical artifacts, including audio- and videoconferencing systems and a media space. We have been studying some of the techniques and social conventions the team develops for its collaboration, and different aspects of what it mean to be located in a shared but distributed workspace. Our approach has been to analyze the initiatives and responses made by the team members. Over time the group created conventions; e.g. the chair introduces team members participating only by audio and members turn off their microphones when not talking. The latter convention led to the side effect of faster decision making. We also identified two characteristics, implicit excluding and explicit including, in a situation where the majority of the team members were co-located.