Collaboration Technology -- The PARC CoLab Project (1987-1992)
Main Participants: Daniel Bobrow, Gregg Foster, Stanley Lanning, Mark Stefik, and Deborah Tatar.
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The Colab project was born out of frustration in the late 1980s. Researchers in PARC's Knowledge Systems Area were enthusiastic users of white boards. We covered the boards with diagrams and writings as we designed programs and various formal representations of circuits. We outlined papers together, and even had an effective brainstorming process for incrementally developing our ideas. But after a meeting we wanted to capture the information in our computers. This meant moving a workstation to the white board area, booting it up, and typing in the information. |
We wondered how we could capture the benefits of our collaboration during our meetings. We had the idea of creating "public windows" on our workstations. We wanted to create software that would allow any of us to write or edit in a window, and arrange it so that others in the group -- at their networked workstations -- could access and share the information. We decided to build a room -- the "CoLab" (or collaboration laboratory) -- to house the workstations. Stefik got an ARPA grant to help pay for the project.
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The Xerox skunkworks built us a prototype liveboard. The image surface was a large frosted glass pane. In the upper right corner was a laser device with a rotating polygon, such as is used for imaging in a copier. Mirrors and retro-mirrors were put on two edges of the board. When you touched the board with a finger or pen, it interrupted the beam -- making it possible to compute the coordinates of the touch point. We also built an ultrasonic-based device for computing locations on a big board and developed a patent for it (which Xerox is now licensing to various parties).
| Here is a photograph of the Colab in operation. We did not want to loose the emotional impact of a big white board -- something that you view from ten feet rather than ten inches. The image on the liveboard was produced using a Hughes video projector in the next room. There were four dorado workstations. Osburne Design of San Francisco worked with us to develop the modular desks and lighting for the room so that there would be no reflective glare on the workstations or liveboard. |
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Colab Movie (36MB) |
Colab meetings tended to be fast-paced and exhilarating. It seemed that we could work very fast. One reason for this was that the tools shifted much of our communication to a visual channel rather than the audio channel -- so it was possible for more than one person (or subgroup) to talk at once -- and still keep up. Another difference was that the computers maintained a tangible, persistent, and shared representation. You could always go back to some object in the visual workspace and ask for clarification. One person could control the view temporarily, and draw other people's attention to something. |
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We noticed that meetings often started when one person joined another in an office. Although a collaboration was starting and we liked using computer support for collaboration, it was a lot of bother to go off to a computer-equipped meeting room, to patch in the computers, and then to boot up the room. We wanted tools we could use instantly in someone's office. We imagined putting liveboards and livepads in offices as in this picture. |
This led to the idea of "portable meetings" -- and ultimately -- to portable ideas. We proposed honoring the inventiveness of groups and the "genius of organizations." Mark Stefik and John Seely Brown wrote a paper on the idea of portable meetings for portable ideas. We proposed building liveboards thin enough to put them in everyone's office. We imagined people walking from one office to another or even to a kitchenette and saying "look at what we've been doing." They could walk up a liveboard, log in, and then resume or branch a meeting.
| Here is a sketch from the "Towards Portable Ideas" paper. |  |
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Three other Colabs were built inside Xerox in addition to the one at PARC. Here is a photograph of a colab that was built in Webster, New York. It was mainly used by a group of engineers designing paper paths for Xerox printers and copiers. This room used our expert system software and other design software as well. |
One of the goals of the Colab project was to study systematically how behavior in computer-augmented meetings differed from regular meetings. We wanted to understand how computers could make a difference and to design meeting software that could make the biggest difference. The photograph on the left below shows out "meeting analyst's workstation". From here, an analyst could control video from three cameras in the room and also record electronic meeting events. The seated people in the photograph below are Gregg Foster and Deborah Tator. Gregg completed his PhD thesis on Cognoter and was involved in designing next generations of meeting tools. Deborah Tatar was engaged in studying meeting behaviors.
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The Colab project was widely noticed and imitated. The National Science Foundation program on the "National Collaboratory" was said to have been inspired by the Colab project.
Main Papers
Patents
