An empirical study of how people establish interaction

In this paper, we report the results of an empirical study of how people, as part of their daily work activities, go about to establish collaboration. We examine the empirical findings and relate them to existing research on CSCW session management models, i.e., the mechanisms in CSCW systems that define the way in which people can join together in collaboration. Existing models leave a lot to be desired, in particular because they tend to assume that indexical elements of interaction management are substitutable by objective representation of artifacts. Based on the empirical findings, we derive three principles to consider in the design of CSCW session management models.