Reframing Taxonomy Development in Collaborative Computing Research: A Review and Synthesis of CSCW Literature 2003–2010

Technological evolution impacts the research and development of new solutions, as well as consumers’ expectations and behaviors. With the advent of the new millennium, collaboration systems and technologies were introduced to support ordinary cooperative work and inter-dependent, socially and culturally mediated practices as integral units of everyday life settings. Nevertheless, existing classification systems are limited in scope to analyze technological developments and capture the intellectual structure of a field, understood as an abstraction of the collective knowledge of its researchers and their socially mediated activities. Ten years after the introduction of Mittleman et al.’s taxonomy, we build upon earlier work and adopt this classification scheme to provide a descriptive, taxonomy-based analysis of four distinct venues focused on collaborative computing research: ACM CSCW, ACM GROUP, ECSCW, and CRIWG. The proposal consists of achieving evidence on technical attributes and impacts towards characterizing the evolution of socio-technical systems via (and for) taxonomic modeling. This study can also constitute an important step towards the emergence of new, potentially more valid and robust evaluation studies combining Grounded Theory with alternative methods and techniques.