Call for Submissions

The W3C WAI Research and Development Interest Group announces a call for 
submissions for our first International Teleconference on Document Collaboration

Introduction

The web is bringing together inviduals and enabling them to collaborate in new 
and innovative ways. Today, diverse communities of people can come together in 
virtual spaces for meetings and working sessions. This is particularly important 
as travel to face to face meetings can be difficult for budgetary or 
security reasons.

Examples of such communities include standards development, engineering, 
knowledge management, software/content development, accessibility, scientific 
research, government/international rules and regulations, and education. 
Diverse, international groups currently use a variety of tools, such as instant 
messaging, IRC, shared desktops, and teleconferencing for real time interaction, 
as well as email, mailing lists, weblogs and proprietary format documents for 
asynchronous interaction.

Collaboration, for example, on a design specification, is typically accomplished 
by using several of the aforementioned technologies, with little real 
integration between the different tools.  Participants in the collaboration may 
not all have equal access in the process, for reasons of disability, bandwidth, 
firewalls, language, etc.

Promising research is underway around the world, exploring innovative 
technologies and user interfaces for collaboration. We are seeking presentations 
from the research community (academia, industry, government, consulting) on 
state of the art work in document collaboration. In particular, we are looking 
for research which can address requirements expressed in the following use 
cases.

    Scenario: An international Open Source Software Project consists of software 
    developers from the US, Japan, Sweden, Thailand, Malaysia, China, and India. 
    Several developers have disabilities, including visual impairments, 
    deafness, mobility impairment, and deaf blind. The project is in its 
    planning stage and developers need to meet virtually to design and create 
    the software specification. Regular face to face meetings are not possible.

    The goal is the shared development of a web-based specification document, 
    with flow charts, diagrams, and screen layouts. Weekly teleconferences 
    involve collaborative review and editing of the specification and its 
    elements. Individuals must be able create and read annotations in a modality 
    appropriate to their needs. For example, graphical annotations or notes (a 
    circled word and added note), need to be visible to all participants.


@@ insert use case 2 ...

Your position paper should describe your research and indicate whether it can 
address some aspect of the scenarios presented in the use cases above, or 
addresses other aspects of collaboration. If you are uncertain as to how your 
work can meet specific use case requirements, it is acceptable to pose this as a 
question in your position paper.

Goals: 

The mission of the Research and Development Interest Group (RDIG) is to 
increase the number of Web-related researchers who incorporate accessibility 
into their research design, and to identify projects researching Web 
accessibility, and suggest techniques that may contribute to new projects. The 
desired outcome of more research in Web accessibility and awareness of 
accessibility in mainstream Web-related research should decrease the number of 
potential barriers in future Web-related technologies. 


Event Information:

The format of the event is a teleconference, augmented by web-based
presentation material, and IRC. Registration is required for participation.

Submission Information:

Position papers are due by xx March 2003 and should be sent to the chair 
(hakkinen@dinf.ne.jp) and W3C staff contact (wendy@w3.org).  The papers should 
be short (approximately 2 paragraphs) and be submitted in HTML or plain text 
format. Papers in other formats will be returned.

The RDIG Planning Group (@@link) will invite the authors of particularly salient 
position papers to make a presentation at the event to foster discussion. The 
invited presentations are to be approximately 15 minutes in length and should 
include slides or other presentation materials. Authors are also required to 
make the slides of their presentation available on the event Web site.

Position papers will be published on the public Web pages for the event, and 
must be available for public dissemination. Submitting a position paper 
comprises a default recognition of these terms for publication. The R&D Interest 
Group is chartered under the W3C Intellectual Property Rights policy 
(http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process-20010719/policies.html#ipr), and 
presenters and participants must acknowledge acceptance of this policy.