teleworking, says james herbsleb, is not a term anyone would use voluntarily anymore. naiv books and a lot of tales have been published about the "wonderful" life of virtual teams, stressing the glory of those who aren't sitting in the same room. but it's not of ease and it needs a lot of energy from both sides to make it work.

there is another term to add: homeshoring, less paid, but attractive for companies, as these slaves are reachable 24 hours.

those who are offshored need to put more energy to get information others suck in with a sip of coffee during kitchen talk; if there is a problem, those who are offshored are the last who will hear the news. carnegie mellon university, the workplace of james herbsleb has some studies on that topic ... underlining that even simple things of human interaction can't be reproduced easily by wire.

now there is a new project around that tries to take into account a lot of last years findings on teleworking. workplace studies have been done in former years at xerox, now lancaster, king's college, england and japanese universities are more exciting places where the shortage of digitalized workspaces are studied. on the other side, i didn't check xerox lately ... anyhow:

These studies demonstrate the importance of the interplay of gesture and talk in the production of reference, the ways in which looking at something together evolves through a trajectory of coordinated action ..

that's how a workspace can look like according to the agora system

"handling documents and discriminating objects in hybrid spaces" will be presented at chi in april 2006.

a related paper: a hybrid image-based and model-based telepresence system ...