Building Groupware on THYME
June 2006
Seth Landsman, The MITRE Corporation
Richard Alterman, Brandeis University
ABSTRACT
The study of collaboration within a community of users, as
it is mediated by a computer application, requires the construction of
groupware applications to mediate the collaboration. It also requires the
capability to analyze the collaboration as it is mediated by the computer
application. As the understanding of collaboration within a group unfolds,
ideally, the application can be quickly adopted to fit the changing
requirements of the group. Whereas existing toolkits for building groupware
applications provide support for building production-level groupware,
they do not provide the mechanism for analysis and rapid development
of new applications, which is necessary for the study of collaboration.
This paper presents an engineering methodology and a set of key requirements
for building groupware applications that enable the analysis
of collaboration as mediated by these applications. We describe the
THYME framework and show how it can help groupware developers to
build applications rapidly and successfully. We also detail how a one
semester Human Computer Interaction class used the THYME framework
to construct synchronous groupware applications in a short amount
of time and with great success.
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