GroupKit History

GroupKit was initially created in 1992 by Mark Roseman, as part of graduate work being done in Saul Greenberg's GroupLab project at the University of Calgary. While it started life as a C++/InterViews toolkit, with the arrival of Tcl-DP, the system quickly migrated to Tcl/Tk.

GroupKit was designed to make it easy to quickly prototype groupware applications, so that various researchers could experiment with different collaborative architectures and interaction techniques, notably in workspace awareness and session management. The quick learning curve and rapid development characteristics of GroupKit led to it becoming quite popular in the CSCW community, both among researchers and educators.

GroupKit evolved fairly rapidly from 1993-1998, thanks to a host of contributors both at Calgary and around the world, including several substantial contributions and two ground-up rewrites. The last 5.1 Calgary release was somewhat of a consolidation, rationalizing some architectural experiments done in 4.x, and trimming down many of the contributed demos that had been carried along in the 3.x releases.

GroupKit development trailed off in 1998; for most of the users, it proved a sufficiently robust and flexible platform to meet their needs. Mark had by that time moved on to TeamWave, bringing with him many of the GroupKit concepts (if not the actual implementation).

You can still find a variety of papers and other publications covering GroupKit and related systems at UCalgary's GroupLab Publications page.

Prodded by Chad Thatcher, GroupKit development was moved to SourceForge and restarted in early 2003, with Chad and Mark leading the next phases of development.

 
Hosted by: