Abstract

We present an initial attempt to formally evaluate performance measures related to CSCW applications. In particular, we study the relations between the quality of the output, the number of people and time spent on the overall task and the total work done. We introduce a novel application to illustrate our ideas: collaborative retrieval. We propose a specific heuristic to the case when many people search for the same information, thereby increasing the recall and precision of the answer. We apply our evaluation methodology to this case.