The multiple views of inter-organizational authoring.

ABSTRACTCollaborative authoring is a common workplace task. Yet, despite improvements in word processors, communication software, and file sharing, many problems continue to plague co-authors. We conducted a qualitative study in a setting where participants are loosely connected, physically separated, and work together over a period of 4-9 months to author a complex technical document-a clinical trial protocol. Our study differs from most prior work in that the collaboration is longer-lived, and that the collaborators do not share equivalent status, background, nor domains of expertise. Our data demonstrates that the participants do not share the same view or representation of the authoring process, even though it has a long organizational history. Nonetheless, the participants can still coordinate their activity while maintaining only partially consistent representations of what they are doing. We contend that partial consistency in the participants' concept of the collaborative process is a feature for their asynchronous collaboration at a distance. Based on our findings we suggest a number of improvements for both tools and tool usage that have direct impact on support for collaborative authoring.