The BSCWeasel and Eclipse-powered Cooperative End User Development

The position paper reports on our experiences with building an Eclipse based BSCW client called BSCWeasel. The client opens new opportunities for using the BSCW system, which was developed as a web-based groupware solution providing coordination support concepts like Shared Workspaces, Awareness Support, Community Support, etc. (see http://www.bscw.de/). It is an important goal of the BSCW approach to provide end users with the support to adapt (“tailor”) the system to match their current cooperation needs.We will use this system as an example application to investigate the area of cooperative end user development (EUD). EUD deals with tools and techniques for end users for the tailoring of software systems for individual preferences as well as for changing requirements. The technical approach, called component-based tailorability, was inspired by combining the work of Doug McIlroy and Alan Kay (Mørch et al. 2004; Stevens and Wulf 2002).[...]