The grand challenge: building evolutionary technologies

It is pointed out that many social scientists have repeatedly insisted that group work is not necessarily cooperative and have challenged the assumption that equality among participants is the best and most appropriate approach for group work. The authors accept these observations as a valid starting point and go one step further by describing three key attributes that computed-supported cooperative work (CSCW) technologies must have if they are to achieve wide-scale adoption. They call technologies that have these attributes evolutionary technologies, and the grand challenge is how to build these technologies. These attributes are a comprehensive foundation that supports an unlimited repertoire of human interaction forms, a natural, dynamic change mechanism, and logical starting defaults. To illustrate the concept of an evolutionary technology, the authors discuss several existing CSCW technologies that have some, but not all, of the attributes of an evolutionary technology. They then describe a prototype coordination technology that has all three attributes; it is considered to be an exemplary evolutionary technology