INTRODUCTIONTO THE SPECIALISSUEON COMPUTER SUPPORTEDCOOPERATIVE WORK(CSCW) MARILYN M. MANTEl As it grows, the SIGCHI community spawns new technical areas. Although SIGCHI itself is a relative youngster, it has already seen the Hypertext, UIST and CSCW conferences come into being as offshoots of CHI. This issue of the SIGCHI Bulletin is devoted to the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work. The CSCW field has grown so quickly that it is experiencing the same problems the early CHI community faced. These include (1) widely scattered literature that is difficult to find, (2) different conflicting paradigms for approaching the CSCW subject area, (3) multiple approaches for building and studying groupware systems but no framework for how or where to use them, and (4) a lack of integration of the new CSCW approaches with current technology. Four articles have been selected for publication in this issue to provide useful (albeit incomplete) solutions to the problems CSCW researchers and practitioners are facing. The first article by Jonathan Grudin gives the reader a guided tour of what it is like to attend two "supposedly" similar conferences on CSCW, one held in Heraklion, Crete, IFIP WG8.4 Conference on Multi-User Interfaces and Applications, and the other held in Los Angeles, California, CSCW'90. He titles his article "A Tale of Two Cities: Reflections on CSCW in Europe and the United States" and walks the reader through a series of comparisons of the similarities and differences in both conferences which were held 17 days apart. The comparisons tease out the paradigm differences between the European and American approach and help the reader to understand how the different emphasis lead to different research and development approaches. Scott Henninger provides us with a CSCW overview in his CSCW'90 trip report and discusses the maturing of the field. He notes that the most recent conference had less emphasis on flashy new systems and more on carefully done studies on existing CSCW applications. An over 30 page annotated bibliography has been prepared by Saul Greenberg for the Bulletin reader who is lost in the maze of places that publish CSCW articles. Except for the CSCW conference proceedings there has been no journal or newsletter that is dedicated to this field. Nevertheless, Saul gives a good overview of where to look for CSCW articles and for CSCW software systems. He creates a basic conceptual framework for the field to which he ties his annotated bibliography and bibliographic sources. The fourth article in this CSCW issue treats the seamlessness problem of CSCW systems and suggests that the solution was always with us in the very reflexiveness of our individually oriented systems. Andrew Cockbum and Harold Thimbleby in "A Reflexive Perspective of CSCW" discuss the current problem of CSCW system "rejection by users" as one of failure to integrate with the current ways we accomplish tasks individually. They point out that many of the individual reflexive communication tasks that we already do are synonymous with group communication tasks and suggest that taking the approach of expanding these tasks into groupware will generate the seamlessness between the individual and group environment we are trying to achieve. Overall, the CSCW articles in this issue have been included to give the reader a survey of this new field by providing an overview of its structure, a discussion of its controversies, access to its literature and suggestions for resolving as yet unresolved problems. SIGCHI Bulletin July 1991 Volume 23, Number 3

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