IT C515 CSCW - Reading for Week 2

What are the major differences between collocated and distant work? Why does "distance matter"?

• Well in the collocated work case it easy for the workers to meet and talk about the work progress or anything because they are physically at the same place and time. And they can manage to solve any kind of problems or arguments they encounter on the spot. But when we come to the distant work, it is a bit difficult to achieve the above points because peoples (workers) are located in different places on the world. That means there is very big difference between places by time zone, culture, weather, and many more. So it is difficult to achieve a better working environment and achieve the desired goal on specific time in projects with has different location in the world. But still in some extent it can be managed a little bit, by using technology like, email, telephone, video conference, and others.
  
  
• Distance matters because it is hard to manage differences in different places. Even with the help of technology it is still difficult to manage a team in Africa and in USA. First there is a problem of Time Zone, for example when the team in Africa finishes there works and try to go to home in the other hand team in USA starts there day time. It will be hard to make a proper communication in the situations like this and even after solving this problem there might be no common ground for the topic they need to talk about, there also might be a weather, culture, and technology usage and infrastructure problems. So in general even in the 21th century for a project to be accomplished successfully the better choice is collected work but still distance can be managed in some extents.

What do you think: will it be possible to make distributed teams as efficient as collocated ones in the future?

• I can say it might be possible with the help of technology. Yes, now it is difficult to manage workers in different areas. But when we see the growth of technology from the past like 10 years we might hope for the future it might brought a solution for working in distance too. When email and video conferencing first introduced it doesn't look like it will actually be the part of everybody’s life nowadays. So for example providing a virtual room for all locations, or something like that might solve the problem.