MobiCom: networking dispersed groups

The paper describes MobiCom, a research project aimed at realizing information technology support for dispersed groups of networking, mobile knowledge workers. MobiCom addresses two fundamental problems of this emerging organizational form: work coordination and collective sharing of experiences. The MobiCom project is based on studies of work and IT use in a pharmaceutical research company. It comprises ethnographic investigations, design and evaluation. Mobi-Com has resulted in DARWIN, an application for negotiating task distribution and exchanging lessons learned within the CIDES IT-support group in the company, and MOSCOW, the architecture and protocol by which DARWIN is implemented. Taking seriously the mobile nature of work in the group, DARWIN is lightweight, has low overheads and is easy to use. MOSCOW represents an open approach to mobile computing, aiming to integrate well with existing and future desktop applications. MobiCom contributes to establishing a new, interdisciplinary research area, by bringing CSCW and HCI concerns into the rather technical domain of mobile computing.