CSCW for professional community support

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems, constitute a pervasive intervention into organisational life. As a consequence, the CSCW system designer has to take extra care to understand that different requirements and different technologies will lead to very different systems. The authors briefly survey some of the possible organisational requirements for CSCW systems, concentrating particularly on the orientation at STL to professional communities. They discuss the fundamental distinction between two kinds of interactions which occur within all organisation types, the global versus local management distinction, and outline the technologies available to support them. Finally, they mention some of the problems in the design of a CSCW system for professional community support