The study of collaboration within a community of users, as it is mediated by a computer application, requires the construction of groupware applications to mediate the collaboration.
Building Groupware on THYME
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The study of collaboration within a community of users, as it is mediated by a computer application, requires the construction of groupware applications to mediate the collaboration. It also requires the capability to analyze the collaboration as it is mediated by the computer application. As the understanding of collaboration within a group unfolds, ideally, the application can be quickly adopted to fit the changing requirements of the group. Whereas existing toolkits for building groupware applications provide support for building production-level groupware, they do not provide the mechanism for analysis and rapid development of new applications, which is necessary for the study of collaboration. This paper presents an engineering methodology and a set of key requirements for building groupware applications that enable the analysis of collaboration as mediated by these applications. We describe the THYME framework and show how it can help groupware developers to build applications rapidly and successfully. We also detail how a one semester Human Computer Interaction class used the THYME framework to construct synchronous groupware applications in a short amount of time and with great success.