Diego Corti
Universityof Fribourg &
Geneva Interaction Lab, Switzerland

An existing Computer Supported (CS) document review procedure was studied at Oracle U.K.. The analysis focused on both individual and collaborative costs incurred by the system, regarding the many efforts involved in order to achieve a document content agreement (part of common ground) among reviewers: human critical operations for the collaboration to succeed, document structure reference and horizontal communication.
    Data confirmed that the current review procedure (in practice) did not facilitate horizontal communication within the group since the system was critically relying on the document author's actions. Hence the lack of direct exchanges between reviewers would hinder the grounding process and the teamwork would further suffer of iterative meetings in order to build and to compensate the common ground that failed through the CS Collaborative Work.
    A new document review system was designed focusing on these issues, promoting the emergent grounding occurring in face to face review meetings. The new model predicted that individual reviewers in using the new system might adapt their review practice by reading other reviewers' contributions and by amending their comments a few times during the review period and also by referring to others' comments, i.e. giving support or rejecting others' suggestions.
    In the long term, it would benefit the organization by reducing the number of review meetings and by building agreement on critical documents more rapidly and with better accuracy. A pilot study confirmed some of these predictions.