Summary: To appear in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHIÕ96)
The Zephyr Help Instance: Promoting Ongoing Activity
in a CSCW System
Mark S. Ackerman
Leysia Palen
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92717
ackerman, palen@ics.uci.edu
http://www.ics.uci.edu/CORPS/ackerman.html
ABSTRACT
If Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
systems are to be successful over time, it will be necessary
to promote ongoing and continuing activity, not just initial
adoption. In this paper, we consider what technical and
social affordances are required to encourage the continued
use of a CSCW system.
To explore these issues, we examine a chat-like system, the
Zephyr Help Instance, which is used extensively at MIT.
The Help Instance facilitates users asking questions of one

Source: Ackerman, Mark S. - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & School of Information, University of Michigan

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences