As Ryle laments, the initial stages of design with a new “material” often amount to solving yesterday's problems and meeting yesterday's requirements. New possibilities and problems have indeed emerged in the era of CSCW applications. CSCW research and development communities have also taken on older, better-recognized, and still-important problems, problems with their predecessors addressed in efforts to shape groups with the use of artifacts. Several salient cultural objects appear to have traveled with all of these kinds of efforts, most notably that of “efficiency.”

A number of problems are associated with efforts to define or construct a group (in terms of its membership, sphere of action, and scope of accountability). Concern with these problems has surfaced in various forms since the early part of this century (as Sibley's advice in the epigraph suggests).