Side-by-side collaboration: a case study

I analyse the discourse and cross-workspace information movement between two collaborators working side by side on a maintenance task. The analysis revealed four mutually constraining representations: task, system structure, modifications and system behavior. Side-by-side collaborators push or pull information across workspaces in an attempt to ground common representations of these four structures. Although the representations collaborators actually create vary with the type of collaborative endeavor, pushing and pulling information across workspaces is a general collaborative activity. I end by discussing ways in which the push/pull conception of collaboration can be used to inform the design of effective remote collaboration tools. (C) 1998 Academic Press.