Editorial: The real reason I wanted Cmm to succeed: to democratize programming. It wouldn’t belong in any business plan, and I seldom mentioned to anyone, but the real reason I wanted Cmm to succeed was not about making money (although paying the mortgage was always important). The real reason was because of the feeling I had when I programmed a computer to perform work for me

“... applications and services that facilitate collective action and social interaction online with rich exchange of multimedia information and evolution of aggregate knowledge...” [48]

Activities also span place; that is, it is common for work to take place outside of the immediate office environment. However, current office technologies sometimes present a very different view of information across different physical and virtual settings.

The idea that activities may exist at different levels of granularity is not a new one. Boer, van Baalen & Kumar (2002) provide a model explaining how an activity at one level of analysis may be modeled as an action—a component of an activity—at another. This holds true for individual users, as in the example provided above, but is even more pronounced when a single activity is viewed from multiple participants’ perspectives.

Additionally, activities need to be represented in such a way that their contents can be shared, with the caveats that individual participants in an activity may have very different perceptions of the activity, they may bring different resources to play over the course of the activity, and, particularly for large activities in which many individual users participate, users themselves may come and go over the life of the activity.

Recognizing the mediating role of the digital work environment in enabling users to meaningfully collaborate is a critical step to ensuring the success of these systems.

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