ECOSPACE Newsletter No 3

From AMI@Work Communities Wiki

Contents 1 Editor’s Corner 2 Coordinator's Message 3 Analysis of the survey on emerging trends for eProfessionals collaboration space 4 ECOSPACE workshop in Sophia Antipolis 5 ECOSPACE new collaboration paradigms, concepts and scenarios 6 Scenario 1: Collaborative Output Creation 7 Scenario 2: Scenario Company and Freelancers/SMEs 8 Scenario 3: Project Planning and Team Configuration 9 Scenario 4: Webergence 10 Scenario 5: Software Development 11 new ECOSPACE survey on collaboration barriers and enablers 12 IJeC Call-for-Paper

PDF version of Newsletter No 3

[edit] Editor’s Corner

by Marc Pallot, Network & Communication, Newsletter Editor

As previously announced within the last AMI@Work Communities Newsletter prepared by the COMIST project, the ECOSPACE project took over the support of our Collaborative Web Environment (shared workspace, blogging and wiki) and will progressively bring in new functionalities and new collaboration tools that you will be invited to experiment time-to-time. The main goal is to enhance our CWE, and to experiment and discover new collaboration concepts and scenarios where you will be invited to contribute according to your interests.

A new version of the CWE will be implemented and tested during July and August. You will be invited to experiment with this new platform and provide your comments about it in a dedicated community blog.

I also mentioned that a new community page has now to be written by all CWE IP projects that are going to implement Living Labs. In fact, these projects are forming the Living Labs portfolio in the European Commission IST and Media DG Unit INFSO F4 as presented during the "Concertation meeting" which has been held in Brussels on the 13th of June where all projects were invited.

In the next ECOSPACE newsletter issue n°4 there will be a guided tour of all ECOSPACE Living Labs. One of them, the Frascati Living Lab, is a collaboration place for ECOSPACE and C@R projects.

Inside this issue, you will find several articles related to new collaboration concepts and scenarios developed by ECOSPACE.

I cannot resist any longer to tell you that this new approach to collaboratively editing newsletters within wiki pages (where by the way, everyone interested can contribute) has been a great success. I was also hoping it could be useful for those who are going to take over the newsletter responsibility while ECOSPACE is already adopting this new way of collaboratively editing newsletters within wiki pages.

So, it seems that the successful continuation is already on the road!

Last but not least, beside the fact that ICE'2007 conference was, as traditionally, of high profile and quality, I'm very glad to tell you that we had very enjoyable social activities as well. In case you need some proof then don't miss the ICE Newsletter N°3 reporting about ICE'2007 in Sophia Antipolis.

I do hope that you will enjoy this Wiki based ECOSPACE newsletter

[edit] Coordinator's Message

by Wolfgang Prinz, ECOSPACE Project Coordinator

During the recent months, ECOSPACE has been participating to the following events:

• 23 May 2007, International Workshop on Virtual Research Environments and Collaborative Work Environments, Edinburgh, Scotland
• 4-6 June 2007, ICE'2007 Conference, Sophia Antipolis, France
• 13 June 2007, Concertation Meeting, Brussels, Belgium

ECOSPACE has organised the following events:

• 12-14 February 2007, Internal Project meeting, Rome, Italy
• 5 June 2007 ECOSPACE Workshop New Collaboration Concepts and Scenarios, Sophia Antipolis, France
• 23-24 April 2007, eProfessionals Living Labs Workshop in collaboration with the CORELABS project and Open Innovation Living Labs Community, Sankt Augustin, Germany

On the technical side, ECOSPACE project has been focusing on the following major developments:

• emerging trends and corresponding collaboration concepts and scenarios
• first version of a reference architecture for CWE
• middleware components based on the Collaborative Composite Services (CoCoS) concept - will be presented in the next issue
• first CWE prototypes and tools

In this issue you will find a collection of scenarios that have been produced in this context. The ongoing developments are more difficult to illustrate in such a newsletter, therefore your are invited to experience some of them yourself at the AMI@Work community site. Here you will find new features inside BSCW like tagging, blogs, and expectation awareness as new parts of the workspaces service. Please have a look!

In the near future ECOSPACE will be participating to the following up-coming events:

• 2-5 September 2007, Mensch und Computer 2007 Weimar, Germany
• 24-28 September 2007, 10th European Conference on CSCW Limerick, Ireland
• 4-7 November 2007, International Conference on Supporting Group Work Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

[edit] Analysis of the survey on emerging trends for eProfessionals collaboration space

by Marc Pallot, ESoCE-NET

The ECOSPACE project has developed an electronic survey dedicated to the emerging trends for eProfessionals collaboration space that could provide valuable input for new breakthrough collaboration scenarios and concepts.

This eSurvey is composed of several polls available on the ECOSPACE related web sites, since June 2006. AMI@Work communities’ members have been invited to respond to this survey. The positive aspects of using several polls to form an eSurvey is, first of all, the simplicity and short time needed to vote. Secondly, the flexibility of using several polls which let visitors make a pause after completing one or two polls within the eSurvey and come back later on to complete other polls and so forth.

This technique of electronic survey composed by several polls has already been successfully applied within the MOSAIC project. This previous eSurvey was dedicated to Future Mobile Workplaces and was posted in the AMI@Work communities’ web environment. We have got about 160 respondents that took part in the vote of the corresponding polls and about 800 readers that were interested to look at the instructive resulting figures.

This ECOSPACE eSurvey is also posted in the AMI@Work communities’ web environment and in the VE-Forum community environment as most of those communities’ members know already the subject and are at the same time potentially interested to see the resulting figures. There is no obligation to take part to the vote of the different polls for being authorised to take a look at the resulting figures. It is intended to avoid forcing people responding fake answers simply because they want to get access to the resulting figures. This approach should at the same time minimise the results “pollution” by forced votes and encourage only knowledgeable and fully volunteer people to respond.

The survey includes the following complementary six dimensions and corresponding polls:

• business
• work setting
• social
• technology
• societal
• legal

Several assertions were provided for each dimension and survey participants were requested to respond whether they believe it was a trend or not a trend. Each possible answer was finally split in two, like “current trend” or “emerging trend” in case the respondents perceive the assertion as being a trend and “still not a trend” or “definitely not a trend” in case they perceive the assertion as not being a trend. This approach allows to understanding the status of each assertion as the meaning could be radically different. For example in the case it is not a trend then it is important to know whether the respondent believes it has a chance to become a trend or not.

This analysis is based on the observation of responses over a period of approximately six months. There were from 67 up to 112 respondents depending on the concerned dimension, see figure 1 for the detailed number of respondents by dimension. The survey resulting figures have got about 2250 hits as all resulting figures are freely accessible without to get any obligation to respond to the survey. As one can expect, the legal and societal dimensions have got the lower number of respondents and constitute the first plateau with about 70 respondents each. Social and work setting dimensions constitute the second plateau with about 80 respondents each. It might look a bit strange that the technology dimension constitutes the third plateau with about 90 respondents while the business dimension represents the fourth and last plateau with about 110 respondents. However, it should be noticed that the business dimension is the first item in the list of the six complementary polls and that it is possible to stop responding after each poll is completed.

It is also important to notice the fact that the “definitely not a trend” response is in average quite insignificant with very low percentages of response from 0% to 4% and with highest pick at respectively 15%, 13% and 10% for the most provocative assertions B1, W9 and St10. It is quite obvious to deduct that respondents do believe that all mentioned assertions were either known as trends or might become trends soon. The response “still not a trend” is much more significant. It has seven majority cases at over 50% with T3, L1, L5, St2, St3, St9 and St10 assertions. The various radar graphs provide a good overview of the repartition of responses mainly between the “emerging trend” and “still not a trend”.

The most significant response is “emerging trend” which has the larger number of majority cases (sixteen) with B2, W2, W3, W4, St1, St4, St6, S3, S6, L4, T2, T4, T5, T7, T11 and T13 as also shown on the various radar graphs. The “current trend” response has a lower number of majority cases than the previously mentioned two with B3, B4, W1 and T1.

Business Trends

In the business dimension, the proposed assertions were the following:

• B1. Individual productivity increase is slowing down
• B2. Interpersonal productivity becomes the Holy Grail
• B3. Business alliances with other stakeholders are more and more global (e.g. customers, suppliers)
• B4. Innovation is becoming a key factor of competitiveness
• B5. Creativity is becoming a key factor of competitiveness
• B6. Partnership within regional innovation clusters
• B7. Communities of practice involvement in business alliances
• B8. On-line Communities involvement in business alliances

The most radical change in business trends appears to be the shift from individual productivity [B1] toward interpersonal productivity [B2] (considered as an emerging trend for 66% of respondents) while business alliances becoming global [B3] and innovation becoming a key factor of competitiveness [B4] are both considered as current trends with respectively 57% and 74%.

Creativity becoming a key factor of competitiveness [B5] is also considered as a trend by 81% of respondents with the following repartition: current trend by 38% of respondents and as an emerging trend by 43% of them. Partnership within regional innovation clusters [B6], Communities of practice involvement in business alliances [B7] and On-line Communities involvement in business alliances [B8] have also got a majority as being a trend with respectively 73%, 60% and 56%. One may conclude that an eProfessionals collaboration space should be focusing on supporting interpersonal productivity rather than individual productivity and that innovation and creativity support as well as collaboration with regional clusters and communities of practice are the most essential elements of the business dimension. These trends will lead to the necessary emergence and development of new collaboration concepts, such as collaboration awareness and knowledge connection, and new collaboration scenarios such as concurrent innovation.

Work Setting and Arrangements Trends

In the Work setting and arrangements dimension the proposed assertions were the following:

• W1. For eProfessionals flexible work is becoming a norm
• W2. Organisations actively promote and support eProfessional nomadic-style working patterns to achieve business objectives
• W3. eProfessionals having more working time done collaboratively
• W4. eProfessionals having working time spent within professional communities
• W5. eProfessionals develop more and more their career within professional communities
• W6. Remote working is becoming a norm (e.g. working from customers' sites, from home, from travelling places)
• W7. On-line contribution is becoming a must (e.g. contributing to on-line communities)
• W8. Organisations are more and more looking for remote access to expertise (e.g. professional communities)
• W9. Playing with designated conceptual arenas to facilitate shared understanding (e.g. playing with Lego, activity modelling, gaming)

Not surprisingly, in the “Work setting and arrangements trends”, flexible work [W1] is considered as already a current trend for 56% of respondents and as an emerging trend for 34% of them. Further to this, 33% of respondents foresee eProfessionals spending most of time working collaboratively [W3] as a current trend while 54% of them foresee it as an emerging trend. Last but not least, respectively 16% and 58% of respondents consider eProfessionals spending time within professional communities [W4] as a current and emerging trend. Regarding the assertion about organisations promoting and supporting nomadic-style [W2], 60% consider it as an emerging trend while 30% foresee it as still not a trend; only 8% consider it as a current trend.

The two following assertions, Remote working is becoming [W6] a norm and On-line contribution is becoming a must [W7], have a very close score and large majority as being trends with about 35% considering them as being already current trends and about 47% as emerging trends. Interestingly, Remote access to expertise [W8] has gained 20% as current and 46% as emerging trend which means again a quite large majority of respondents do believe it will happen in the near future. More surprisingly, the assertion about Playing with conceptual arenas to facilitate shared understanding [W9] has got for the first time a relative majority of respondents who consider it as still-not-a-trend with 46%. There is only 31% considering it as an emerging trend and 10% as a current trend while both modelling and gaming activities were given as examples of conceptual arenas facilitating shared understanding.

Societal Trends

In the societal dimension the proposed assertions were the following:

• St1. Inclusion supported by remote working (e.g. surmounting physical handicaps)
• St2. Reducing segregation through remote working (e.g. racial considerations, appearance)
• St3. Improving the inclusion of elderly people (e.g. contribution to on-line communities)
• St4. Extension of working life (e.g. remote working, on-line expertise, on-line professional communities)
• St5. Remote socialising: building relationships with people before you meet them physically becomes common.
• St6. eProfessionals to play a key role in the improved productivity and competitiveness of Europe
• St7. eProfessionals are more and more looking at reducing hours wasted in daily transportation
• St8. eProfessionals looking at improving quality of life and better work/learning/life balance
• St9. eProfessional communities emerging as a key player in work-related political discussions
• St10. Communities of eProfessionals contributing to a shift in power and income distribution from large companies to knowledge workers
• St11. eProfessional communities becoming marketplaces for knowledge work

In the societal dimension, there is an interesting dichotomy between different types of inclusion based on the use of ICT where it seems that respondents were much more convinced by inclusion supported by remote working [St1], which has gained 16% as a current trend and 50% as an emerging trend, than by Reducing segregation [St2] and inclusion of elderly people [St3] which have got majority as still-not-a-trend. However, if it was not convincing with elderly people then it seems that respondents were more convinced for themselves as the assertion Extension of working life [St4] collected 28% as a current trend and 50% as an emerging trend. One may also foresee a relationship with the current trend of pushing the retirement age to a higher limit (e.g. retirement in Germany is now 67 years old).

The assertion about Remote Socialising [St5] has got a consensus as being a trend with a very large majority of more than 80%, only 10% of respondents considered it as still-not-a-trend. It also seems that almost everyone foresee eProfessionals to play a key role in productivity and competitiveness [St6] as this assertion has got a very large majority with 18% as a current trend and 63% as an emerging trend. The same situation applies to the two following assertions, “reducing hours wasted in daily transportation” [St7] and “improving quality of life and better work/learning/life balance” [St8] as it appears clearly that eProfessionals Collaboration Space will have to be extremely mobile and flexible enough to be usable to interact with the family and friends when far away. No-one will feel isolated anymore and therefore will be able to be more focus on its work. A majority of respondents were not convinced by the following two assertions “communities emerging as a key player in work-related political discussions” [St9] and “Communities of eProfessionals contributing to a shift in power and income distribution from large companies to knowledge workers” [St10] as it collected respectively 57% and 53% as still-not-a-trend. Last but not least, the assertion “eProfessional communities are becoming marketplaces for knowledge work” [St11] was more convincing as it collected a majority as being a trend with 57% while 38% of respondents foresee it as still-not-a-trend.

Social Trends

In the social dimension the proposed assertions were the following:

• S1. Integration of social, learning and working activities
• S2. Remote socialising (e.g. on-line social networking)
• S3. Setting-up a social arena to facilitate shared understanding
• S4. Professional communities are emerging as source of Group forming networks
• S5. Looking to external expertise through social networks
• S6. Looking to external expertise through on-line social networks

C onfirming the resulting figures of societal trends “Remote socialising: building relationships with people before you meet them physically becomes common” [St5] and “eProfessionals looking at improving quality of life and better work/learning/life balance” [St8], the “Remote socialising as online social networking” [S2] and “Integration of social, learning and working activities” assertions of the social dimension have got also a majority as being trends with respectively 73% and 63%. Then, it may look strange that the assertion “Setting-up a social arena to facilitate shared understanding” [S3] has got the majority as being a trend with 65% compared to the assertion “Playing with conceptual arenas to facilitate shared understanding” [W9] with minority as being a trend with 41%.

One may conclude that respondents believe more in social interactions for being able to reach a shared understanding rather than using technical interactions such as modelling. This is a very instructive indication. The highest majority of votes as being a trend came to the assertion “Professional communities are emerging as Group Forming Network” [S4] with 76% of respondents. One could easily explain this result as most of respondents were certainly communities’ members and that they are experienced with this phenomenon. Looking to the two last assertions, results are self explanatory as almost everyone has already being looking to external expertise through his own social network [S5] and only recently for less people through their own online social networks [S6].

Legal Trends

In the legal dimension the proposed assertions were the following:

• L1. Intellectual Property Rights to be managed through individual contributions (e.g. wiki)
• L2. Employment regulations are changing towards more flexible work
• L3. Creative Common principle is generalising
• L4. Open Source is becoming a norm
• L5. Working contracts to be managed within professional communities
• L6. Business legal entities to be complemented by more social legal entities (e.g. not profit making organisations for professional communities)

In the legal trends, the assertion about employment regulations changing towards more flexible work [L2] has gained 33% as being already a current trend and 49% as being an emerging trend while only 15% of respondents believe it is still-not-a-trend. It means that a large majority of respondents, about 82%, are convinced that employment regulations are introducing more flexible work. Quite surprisingly, the assertion suggesting that Open Source is becoming a norm [L4] has got also a large majority of votes, about 80%, as being a trend with 28% as being a current trend and 52% as being an emerging trend. One could conclude that the open source movement could disseminate his approach in other sectors. In the same view of open innovation, the assertion suggesting that Creative Common principle is generalising [L3] has got a lower score but still has reached also the majority with 7% as being a current trend and impressive 48% as being an emerging trend.

More surprisingly, while both open source and creative common principles reached respectively a large majority as being a trend, it seems that respondents were not convinced by having Intellectual Property Rights to be managed through individual contributions [L1], even if wiki was mentioned as an example. This assertion gained an impressive 57% as being still-not-a-trend and 3% as being definitely-not-a-trend while only 27% of respondents considered it as being an emerging trend and 13% as being a current trend. This is not the only one having this kind of majority as the assertion about “Working contracts to be managed within professional communities” [L5] received 52% as being still-not-a trend. Finally, the assertion suggesting that social legal entities could be complementing traditional business legal entities [L6] in order to support legally professional communities received 47% of respondents considering it as being a trend while a majority, about 53%, doesn’t see it as a trend today.

Technology Trends

In the technology dimension the proposed assertions were the following:

• T1. IP connectivity anywhere at anytime becomes more and more a reality
• T2. Emergence of wearable computing & connectivity
• T3. Emerging designated devices supporting collaborative work (c-pod)
• T4. Immersive spaces or arenas supporting collaboration are emerging (already a reality in gaming)
• T5. Social web and social computing are emerging
• T6. Semantic based applications are emerging
• T7. On-line knowledge connection is emerging as a research field
• T8. New approaches enabling groups to quickly reach a common understanding are emerging (e.g. People-Concepts Networking)
• T9. Contextual based collaborative applications are emerging
• T10. Group or community based blogging is becoming a must
• T11. Wiki is more and more used as adhoc collaboration support within groups or communities
• T12. Shared workspace, wiki and blogging are converging into a single collaborative web environment
• T13. Platform-independent video connectivity (meeting room/desktop/mobile) is emerging

The most impressive result in the technology dimension is the assertion suggesting that IP connectivity is becoming available anywhere at anytime [T1] which received the largest majority, about 96%, of the entire survey with 53% of respondents considering it as being a current trend and 43% as being an emerging trend while only 4% foresee it as being still-not-a-trend and no-one of respondents considering it as being definitely-not-a-trend. The second impressive result is about the assertion proposing that the social web and social computing are emerging [T5] (based on the NEPOMUK project) which has got 32% of respondents considering it as being a current trend and 52% as being an emerging trend. So, altogether it represents a large majority of 84% of the respondents believing that there will be more social support in the web (e.g. Web 2.0) and in more generally speaking in computing as well.

In the same range of large majority of respondents, there is the assertion about on-line knowledge connection emerging as a research field [T7] with 83% of votes while 16% considered it as still-not-a-trend and only 1% as definitely-not-a-trend. Looking more closely at this resulting figure, one could be deducting that the traditional Knowledge Management is not solving the necessity to identify and share knowledge among individuals who have to collaborate. With the same high score of 83%, there is the assertion saying that wiki is the de facto collaboration environment to support communities [T11] while the assertion suggesting that group or community based blogging is becoming a must [T10] has got less with 72% . Then there are three other assertions with a quite large majority, the first one is the emerging platform-independent video connectivity [T13] which as collected 70% of respondent foreseeing it as a trend, the second one is the emergence of wearable computing & connectivity [T2] with 67%, and the third one is the emerging immersive spaces or arenas supporting collaboration [T4] with 66%, which by the way is already a reality in the gaming sector.

Still with a significant majority, there are four other assertions such as “shared workspace, wiki and blogging are converging into a single collaborative web” [T12], the emerging contextual based collaborative applications [T9], the emerging semantic based applications [T6] and the emerging new approaches enabling groups to quickly reach a common understanding [T8] which have gained about 60% of votes. The only one which has got a majority as being still-not-a-trend is the emerging designated devices supporting collaborative work [T3] while an example was given with c-pod in reference of the worldwide famous Ipod.

In conclusion, it should be noticed that almost all assertions have been perceived as being a trend as only one did not reach the majority (see the above radar diagram). Regarding the potential impact on the shaping of the eProfessionals Collaboration Space, the major influencing elements are the almost permanent Internet connectivity, the social touch in the web applications (Web 2.0), the penetration of wiki applications to support all range of groups, especially very large groups dealing with mass collaboration (e.g. Wikipedia), Knowledge Connection through the original approach of People-Concepts Networking and Group or Community based Blogging.

Other interesting elements are the platform-independent video connectivity, as video based applications on the web will be growing very fast due to a high demand, especially from young people; the wearable computing and connectivity that should allow nomadic people to stay connected with their collaborative environment and why not within an immersive arena; the convergence of shared workspace, wiki and blogging into a single collaborative web application; the contextualisation approach of collaborative web application to better support group of individuals in their collaborative working context.

[edit] ECOSPACE workshop in Sophia Antipolis

by Viktor Kaufman, SAP and Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT

 The ECOSPACE Workshop on New Collaboration Concepts and Scenarios 
 for eProfessionals Living Labs has been held during the ICE'2007 Conference 
 in Sophia-Antipolis (Nice), France, on 5 June 2007
  ICE'2007 Conference wiki pages or ICE website
  ICE2007 Programme
  ECOSPACE Workshop Program
 

The 13th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising, ICE 2007, has brought together leading researchers and industry representatives from around the world. In accordance with the motto of the conference "Concurrent Innovation", the discussions were about how to support creativeness and innovation in enterprises where individuals, groups, businesses and communities collaborate together using online shared workspaces. These discussions are obviously relevant for the ECOSPACE project which aims at elaborating new working paradigms and designing an innovative user-centric collaborative platform. ICE 2007 was an ideal place to host the ECOSPACE Workshop on New Concepts and Scenarios.

The main focus of this first workshop was on new collaboration trends and tools. Goal of the workshop was the validation and discussion of the current ECOSPACE developments with a group of experts and potential users as well as the elaboration of new ideas and requirements.

The workshop, organized by ECOSPACE and supported by CORELABS and AMI@Work Communities, attracted representatives from ECOSPACE partner institutions as well as members of other institutions. It was introduced with a short warm welcome by Jean-Pierre Euzen from Directorate General for Information Society and Media of the European Commission and by the ECOSPACE Project Coordinator Wolfgang Prinz.

The workshop proceeded to presentations of existing surveys and studies around collaboration of eProfessionals, including those conducted by project partners. From the company’s internal survey, Servane Crave from Orange-FTGroup derived that Wiki and IM technologies play a crucial role for communication. At the same time, they have some disadvantages as they pay little attention to prevention of misunderstandings. Kjetil Kristensen from ESoCE-NET pointed out that knowledge workers (eProfessionals in the context of ECOSPACE) account for 41% of US labor market , while they account for 70% of new jobs created since 1998. There is a big potential hidden here, as the investments in technology per employee have smallest values for eProfessionals in comparison to more traditional professions!

Almost 40% of corporate performance directly depends on the collaboration quality , which is especially important for eProfessionals. A study of emerging trends for eProfessionals collaboration space described in more detail in this newsletter was presented by Marc Pallot from ESoCE-NET and represents useful data to support innovations.

This was followed by interactive sessions in which Wolfgang Prinz demonstrated the current ECOSPACE developments such as Tagging in shared workspaces, collaboration mining and visualisation, expectation awareness, and RFID based collaboration aware objects. Furthermore videos about the integration of email with shared workspaces, workflow and video conferencing tools have been presented.

What are the three main issues concerning collaboration?

There are different points of view. The points of view of the workshop participants in the form of short statements or keywords were collected before the lunch. Interestingly, after extensive discussions in the afternoon, the statements were requested once again. Some important submitted ideas like innovation itself or interoperability would be foreseeable, others like definition and clear communication of business benefits of collaboration show rather unexpected facets of collaboration.

The workshop addressed many important aspects of innovation of collaboration for eProfessionals. Wolfgang Prinz from FIT initiated lively discussions as he exemplified innovations by FIT’s Collaboration Space solution:

• If a system allows other users to show their expectations on a knowledge worker, how much "pressure" is too much?
• Do you need a notification about the fact that 20% of all users of a workspace have read a particular document?
• If there are many solutions for sharing content, why do people end up sending emails with attachments?

The current achievements within prototype development in ECOSPACE illustrate new collaboration scenarios. For example, why not add value to a workflow system by providing a video conference and instant messaging option where you need them?

The corresponding demonstrations were shown and documented the broad interests and the visionary ambitions of the partners in the project. The different tools and integration approaches were well received by the workshop participants and it became clear that they have the potential to reduce the complexity of todays collaboration patterns. In addition we received a number of suggestions and ideas for further improvements of the current developments. These are currently being discussed with the plans for the developments of the next project phase.

Systematic innovation in the context of collaboration is, for sure, an ambitious task. There are ongoing activities in this direction in ECOSPACE. One could bet that this ECOSPACE workshop at the ICE 2007 was certainly not the last one.

[edit] ECOSPACE new collaboration paradigms, concepts and scenarios

by Marc Pallot, ESoCE-NET

 New Collaboration Paradigms

Introduction

The different paradigms presented in this article have been inspired by books and Wikipedia content more or less related to the Collaborative Web. A number of authors have been looking at the potential impacts of the Internet and web technologies on new ways of working, doing business, innovating and networking with people around the world. The most recent one is entitled “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”, authored by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams – Dec 2006, where Wikinomics appears to be a contraction of the famous wiki technology and (digital) economics.

Other recent and famous books are also looking at open innovation, impact of social and intellectual capital, open communities and collective intelligence, such as:

• "Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge" by Cass R. Sunstein – Aug 2006

"Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom" by Yochai Bentler – May 2006

• "Tao of Democracy: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson
• "Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape" by Henry Chesbrough – Dec 2006
• "Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm" by Henry Chesbrough , Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West (Editors) – Oct 2006
• "Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology" by Henry William Chesbrough – Marc 2003
• "The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki
• "Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace" by Pierre Levy – Jan 2000
• "Webonomics : Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web" by Evan I. Schwartz – Apr 1997

All those books are more or less related to the same vision of the evolution of the cyberspace based on the following principles: self-organisation, mass interaction or collaboration, and emergence, openness, peering, sharing and acting globally. The last four are driving wikinomics as described by Don Tapscott.

Ideagora

Ideagora is a marketplace for ideas. In Ancient Greece, 'agoras' were centres of politics and commerce where citizens could assemble to debate and barter. Modern-day agoras, like eBay, are more focused; they are used to make and distribute ideas, inventions and innovation, as well as commercial goods. Ideagoras are centres where intellectual property is distributed freely within a community for purposes of innovation. Though, work done in an ideagora can deliver a financial reward, say for the best solution to a problem, they do not necessarily involve economic incentives. Embodying values like openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally, ideagoras, along with the open source revolution, are quickly becoming an integral part of large scale innovation.

Early-stage ideagoras are becoming more and more visible across various industries as it has become harder and harder to keep pace with innovation in any specific field. Companies like InnoCentive, NineSigma, InnovationXchange Network, Eureka Medical, YourEncore, and Innovation Relay Centres are using the concept of an ideagora to create new and vibrant, virtual marketplaces across the internet.

Wikinomics

In the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention centre—has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, encyclopaedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics explains how to prosper in a world where new communications technologies are democratizing the creation of value. Anyone who wants to understand the major forces revolutionizing business today should consider Wikinomics their survival kit Wikinomics is a term relating to the theory and practice of harnessing the power of mass collaboration.

One may have some doubt about "mass collaboration", as mentioned in Tapscott book “Wikinomics”, as collaboration appears to be individuals helping each other to achieve a common goal. This means that there should be interaction, asynchronously or synchronously, among those individuals whatever is their number. Larger is the group of individuals and more difficult it is to interact with each other (network law). It has been argued by Lipnack and Stamps that the ideal size for collaborating groups, where technology is not being used, is in between 2 and 8 with an upper limit of about 25 [Lipnack & Stamps 1998].

Stigmergic

However, it seems that mother nature has solved this problem of mass collaboration (a very large group of entities helping each other) as argued in a recent paper by Elliot: "stigmergic collaboration provides a hypothesis as to how the collaborative process could jump from being untenable with numbers above 25 people, towards becoming a new driver in global society with numbers well over 25,000". Stigmergy was first observed in nature - ants communicate to one another by laying down pheromones along their trails, so where ants go within and around their ant colony is a stigmergic system. Similar phenomena are easily seen in many eusocial creatures, such as termites, which use pheromones to build their very complex nests by following a simple decentralized rule set. Each insect scoops up a 'mudball' or similar material from its environment, invests the ball with pheromones, and deposits it on the ground. Termites are attracted to their nestmates pheromones and are therefore more likely to drop their own mudballs near their neighbours. Over time this leads to the construction of pillars, arches, tunnels and chambers. Bee-hives (communities) are also representing a good example of stigmergic collaboration.

Stigmergy is not restricted to eusocial creatures, or even to physical systems. On the Internet there are many emergent phenomena that arise from users interacting only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment. Wikipedia is a perfect example of this. The massive structure of information available in a wiki could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.

In his paper, Elliot is also explaining that stigmergy is a method of communication in which individuals communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. Therefore, it is a logical deduction to qualify as stigmergic interaction to the different types of Web-based communication, especially media such as wiki and community blogging. Elliot is proposing the concept of stigmergy to provides an intuitive and easy-to-grasp theory for helping understand how disparate, distributed, ad hoc contributions could lead to the emergence of the largest collaborative enterprises the world has seen” [Elliot 2006].

Symbiotic

Symbiosis is a close association between two different types of organisms in a community. It can be defined as the living together in permanent or prolonged close association of members of usually two different species, with beneficial or deleterious consequences for at least one of the parties. There are several classes of symbiosis but we are only interested by Mutualism, a relationship in which members of two different species benefit. An example of mutual symbiosis is the relationship between clown-fishes that dwell among the tentacles of tropical sea anemones. The territorial clown fishes protects the anemone from anemone-eating fishes, and in turn the stinging tentacles of the anemone protect clown-fishes from its predators (a special mucus on clown-fishes protects them from the stinging tentacles).

The web is another example of a kind of mutual symbiosis where people take benefits of published information and links while the web is continuously growing with more and more people exposing within blogs or wikis. In this case, web symbiosis could be categorised as ectosymbiosis where symbionts, in fact individuals, live on the body surface which means that people do not really live within the web. However, some types of web applications or games or combination of the two, such as “second-life” where 3 million residents are living inside a virtual world, could be categorised as endosymbiosis where the symbionts live within the hosting application. For sure, it is difficult then to continue the metaphoric biological representation in telling whether this is either in the intracellular or extra-cellular space as those web applications do not behave as cells based entities.

Webergence

The first meaning of Webergence could be the users’ highly expected technological convergence where the term convergence is used in reference to the synergistic combination of voice and telephony features, data and productivity applications, music and video onto a single network. These previously separate technologies are now able to share resources and interact with each other creating new efficiencies. Included in this interpretation there is also the basis of computer networks, wherein many different operating systems and applications are able to communicate via different protocols. This could be a prelude to artificial intelligence networks on the internet. The Apple Iphone is a good example of an ever-wider range of technologies converging into single multipurpose (multi-play) device providing many different services, such as broadband Internet access, television, music, web applications, WIFI connection, and mobile phone service or VoIP free telephone service. Extending a bit further the current technology convergence and this kind of mobile devices could soon become a collaborative device as well.

The second complementary meaning is emergence on the web where the term “emergence” is a term used in Philosophy, Systems Theory and the Sciences to describe the development of complex self-organized systems. Emergence could be virtually considered as the third entity spontaneously generated when several, from 2 to an infinite number, entities are collaborating. It is well-known that the third (virtual) entity is greater than the sum of the collaborating entities. To Goldstein, emergence refers to "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems."[Goldstein 1999]

 New Collaboration Concepts

This article is intended to introduce a set of new collaboration concepts or new usage of existing concepts into the context of new collaboration scenarios that will be experimented within different Living Labs.

A collaboration concept is a symbolic representation of a collaborative phenomena or interaction that can be used alone or in combination with other collaboration concepts. A collaborative concept represents one or more aspects of collaborative working that can be identified and that is different from alternative approaches.

This article dedicated to new collaboration concepts will appear in the next issue (N°4)

 New Collaboration Scenarios

Introduction

ECOSPACE scenarios have been developed to describe innovative eProfessional workplaces for several business domains, to explore the feasibility and desirability of the scenarios, and to assess the impacts of these scenarios as a basis for the functional architectural design of eProfessional working environments.

The scenarios are based on plausible descriptions of future ways of eProfessional working, and are built around eProfessional work processes, workplace conditions (e.g. workplace arrangements and business models) and workplace performance. They will explore innovative concepts e.g. rich media interaction, models for personal and group areas, objects of working environment, process-oriented interaction concepts, and presence and awareness concepts.

Currently there are five on-going scenarios. For comprehensive coverage, the scenarios have been developed for diversity, where the different scenarios include concepts that are:

• Implementable in the short term (right now), medium term (18month), long term (project end)
• Based on identified current user needs & requirements
• Deducted from the survey on emerging trends
• Deducted from factors affecting collaboration
• Based on the literature review
• Based on Collaborative Middleware and collaborative tools

The above figure Scenario Positioning shows how the five collaboration scenarios provides coverage through a spectrum of interactions ranging from synchronous / small group collaboration to asynchronous / mass collaboration. Some scenarios span across a number of different types of interactions.

[edit] Scenario 1: Collaborative Output Creation

by Burak Sari, CeTIM

Mike is a director of the CSCW department at London office of European Research and Innovation Centre (EURIC), non-profit research and innovation centre which has multi-sites in London, Paris, and Munich, who has broad experience on collaborative working and virtual organizations. He has participated in and managed several EU and national projects. He acts as a project initiator behind the scene.

John is a senior researcher in national research organisation of Spain. He leads the competence centre entitled as “Collaborative Work”. His expertise areas are varying from collaborative working to next generation collaboration tools. Mary is a principal researcher at the research centre of Lyon. She specialises in knowledge management, inter-organisational collaboration and ICT. Her research experience limited with two research projects focused on virtual organisations.

Paul is working as a principal researcher in Paris office of EURIC. His research interests are focused on the networked organisations, innovation management and CSCW. Hose is currently head of the engineering department at Xirp located in Spain. He has involved in one EU project with Mike and John. Xirp was founded in 1995 as a Rapid Prototyping Service Bureau. In the meantime, Xirp developed to a system provider who offers holistic solutions to their customers from design to the production of small series.

Toni is currently the head of the Code engineering department located in Spain and supervising all engineering projects. The mission of NODE is to offer competitive advantages for its client’s products in an ever changing and turbulent environment. He graduated as an industrial engineer, and has more then 10 years experience in leading big teams of engineers and managing complex engineering projects. Toni has some past experiences with Mike based on some EU research projects.

• Day 1: This morning, Mike has received an urgent voice-mail to his PDA in his way to the work. In the v-mail, Toni talks about required actions and limited time period regarding preparation of project proposal in the upcoming call.
• Day 2: Mike and Paul discuss on general action points about how to activate and operate team towards writing proposal. They agreed on a high level action list and share few initial tasks as organisation of a kick off meeting and new workspace creation in BLUE.
• Day 5: As a first action point, Mike creates a distribution list for proposal and sends a virtual meeting request through his personal e-mail account of BLUE to discuss further steps for proposal preparation.
• Day 7: In a parallel manner, Paul creates a wiki; online workspace that would allow members to collaboratively create and edit Web pages for proposal writing. In this workspace he also creates a new section entitled as “Agenda for kick off meeting” to allow the core team to collaboratively write and edit meeting agenda in this shared workspace. Besides, Paul also sends an invitation mail to the team which are not yet registered to the BLUE.
• Day 7: Hose receives the invitation e-mail for the workspace, clicks on the link and performs the registration, then becomes a member of the project workspace.
• Day 8: Then, Paul receives an automatic notification e-mail within which a link to the history logs of workspace is attached. He follows the link to track and compare the edits of page and follow the evolution of the agenda. After a short overview, he grants the authorization for publishing the revised content.
• Day 9: On the other hand, Mike proposes to have the kick off meeting face to face (FTF), but Paul comes up with a suggestion of having the meeting on workspace which has an interactive web based communication service for voice, video and data web conferencing/collaboration. Mike agrees on this proposal and quickly organises a video-conferencing session through workspace. After a while, all attendees were received an invitation from workspace within which a link is embedded for joining to the session.
• Day 10: In the day of virtual kick-off meeting, all attendees receive a second notification e-mail which aims to remind the appointment half an hour before the meeting starts. Mike opens the session and in a few minutes all attendees join the conferencing environment one on a after. Due to workspace supports multi-point video, video windows of 5 attendees are displayed in the same screen.

After a brief welcome talking, Mike shares the agenda slide with others through PowerPoint (which is extracted from wiki) using the application sharing functionality of workspace. Then, Mike opens the discussion on the objectives and added value of the project. They all agreed on this proposal and approximately in an hour key objectives as well as main outcomes are roughly specified in Mindmap.

Mike closes the mindmap and starts using the whiteboard functionality to generate some ideas about the project content. After a brief discussion, main content topics are almost defined. As a next action, Mike grants the co-moderator authority to Paul to let him specify main action points. Almost all action points are specified except decision on which authoring tool should be used. Although Mike & Paul suggest using Wiki, Hose & John disagree with this proposal and insist on using traditional approach, Word. Toni looks indecisive between these two suggestions. Mike decides to use voting tool to solve this conflict and votes these two alternatives in a poll and consequently Wikis gets accepted 3 over 2.

Apart from action points, the duration for establishing the first draft of proposal was determined as 2 months including all internal and external reviews as well as required revisions.

Once after a rough draft of action points was established, project initiator; Mike asks the partners their availability and contribution for the listed tasks. Based on feedback coming from partners, he realises that one additional partner is really needed to fulfil the proposal in a specified time period. Paul suggests inviting one of his past colleagues who have broad knowledge and close interest on the subject. Everyone welcomes the idea of new partner and as a last action; further meetings are planned following a simple guideline.

In this scope, firstly meeting dates are specified using automatic agenda checking functionality of the workspace within which system checks the shared calendar of each participant and generate a list of date/time proposals for each meeting. Secondly, a rough agenda is generated for each meeting with a specification of meeting location (FTF, audio conf., video conf.).

Once after related working documents are specified and shared in the context of each meeting, potential attendees are invited to participate in each meeting. After setting up each meeting with respectively, the session ends up & system automatically creates the meeting minutes and stores it in the related meetings folder of the workspace.

• Day 11: Paul calls Mary; new candidate partner and has a discussion on whether her research institute might be interested to contribute on this joint project proposal. In a few days, Mary informs Paul the good news regarding contribution on the relevant proposal. As a next action, Paul adds Mary in the distribution list of the project and lets her aware about the workspace and minutes of the latest discussion with an invitation to the workspace. Using BLUE, Mary logs on to the system and finds her own personal view of the project, tailored to her professional background and her role in the project. BLUE guides her to describe and store her contribution to the project as well as upload her video blog. In addition, BLUE lets her track on who is working on what part of the proposal, too.
• Day 12: Paul prepares a well-structured page that gives a comprehensive tutorial about how to perform collaborative authoring within wikis. He uses category tags that support for readers by helping them to sort through content. Therefore, he adds the related page in the User Manuals category. When the user clicks on the category link provided at bottom of page, he would receive a list of pages that carry the indicated tag. Then, he sends an automatic notification message from the system to the users’ e-mail account to inform them about the availability of the guide.
• Day 13: Mike starts to work on the preparation of the proposal template based on section headings finalised in the latest discussion. Apart from these sections, he also includes a comment section to let the users provide some remarks or comments reg. proposal.
• Day 18: As an opening issue in the first operation meeting, new participant; Mary has introduced herself to the consortium. In a parallel manner, participants use the dashboard functionality to find her video blog shared in the workspace. Then, Mike initiates the recording of the meeting, shares the project wiki and starts to present so far achieved sections of the proposal.
• Day 23: Hose receives an info e-mail from BLUE about related changes or amendments done by Mary on collaboratively working part of the proposal since last access to the dedicated section. He tracks on what has been changed so far, logs on BLUE and makes some amendments in the dedicated section of the document and then asks Mary via msg to discuss updates who looks online in BLUE at that moment.

Based on affirmative reply from Mary, he creates a multi-conference session where related proposal page has also been shared to be used during discussion. All documents related with that section are automatically shared and links to those are placed on right side of the screen with a short description. On the other hand, Hose invites Paul to this discussion that also appears to be online at that moment. At the end of discussion, all sketches and mindmap created during session are stored in the workspace and other team members are also notified for instant meeting and documents created during the meeting via both IM and e-mail.

• Day 34: Authoring of all assigned sections is completed two days before deadline. Mike checks the entire project proposal in terms of writing quality and context. After removing some irrelevant parts and making relevant modifications, he signs the wiki as “ready for internal review”.
• Day 35: Once after Paul receives the related “internal review” notification message, Paul remotely contacts Svetlana, to request the review of proposal. She is on the road, therefore she uses PDA module of BLUE which allows her to download the proposal, to review it and to synchronize it with the web version.
• Day 40: Mike is travelling a lot and has a tight schedule. Using PDA module, he enlarges the editor use context which allows viewing comments of reviewer clearly. He then makes a call to Svetlana via BLUE to retrieve some other explanations.
• Day 40: BLUE informs Paul as well as other members regarding newly created minutes of review discussion between Mike and Svetlana either via IM or e-mail based on her presence at that moment. Paul follows the link provided in IM, downloads the related audio file and gets updated on discussion.

[edit] Scenario 2: Scenario Company and Freelancers/SMEs

by Björn Kijl, University of Twente

The project we are looking at focuses on information exchange and coordination needed for the development of a customized cartographic product by a multi-organizational project team. For creating such a product, Point-of-Interest (POI) documents and related POI-database need to be developed. Therefore databases need to be updated and checked, POI information needs to be delivered and processed and converted into cartographic maps.

The development of a cartographic product is a complex process, with a lot of interactions between all project partners. Therefore, having a good project plan and project team is crucial.

The project team consists of a diverse set of project partners from a cartographic company based in Milan (a product manager, a database manager, some atlas designers and custom page designers), some freelance designers (SMEs) from Rome, Munich, and Valencia and the customers of the cartographic company (gas station representatives like marketing managers and country managers).

The culture is informal, with no strict hierarchy and strong self-organization capabilities, democratic decision making and transparency of information. The roles and competencies of the project members are transparent and synchronous as well as asynchronous interaction play an important role for information exchange, coordination and control.

After having some informal discussions with all project partners via instant messaging, audio and video conferencing, Jeff, the product manager from the cartographic company, develops a first version of the long term planning. With his advanced collaborative workspace, Jeff can see the status information – in the form of a status dash board – of all project participations (are they currently busy, at work, on the road, what is their preferred communication channel at this moment, on what document(s) are they working?). To further improve collaboration project members can also see on which project relevant documents their colleagues are currently working.

Because Jeff developed a first version of the planning in his online collaborative working environment and directly shared the planning with all other project members, all participants are able to see, discuss, review and update the project planning via their own, customized collaborative working environment (together as well alone, synchronous as well as asynchronous). With a built-in polling function innovative ideas of team members can be effectively evaluated, e.g. during a video conferencing with map designers.

Christine, as a freelance cartographic designer from Munich, really likes the advanced presence functionality in her online workspace. When she sees Jeff is working on a work division table in the planning document, she proposes to help filling in the work division table. She clicks on the icon representing Jeff besides the planning document in her workspace and then starts an audio conference. Jeff likes her idea – all help is welcome – and together they work – simultaneously – on the document. During this collaborative working process, Christine and Jeff still have an open audio connection. In this way, they can work perfectly together. According to Christine, it is even better than having a face-to-face meeting for working together because they now can really working together on the same plan at the same!

Most project members regularly check and update the project plan when necessary. Proposed changes need to be accorded by the project manager. Most of the time, the proposed changes make a lot of sense and Jeff is therefore happy to accept the proposed changes. It saves him a lot of time as well!

One of the big advantages of the advanced project planning functionality in the collaborative working environment is the sophisticated way in which projects and tasks or so-called next actions are being connected in the system.

The connection is based on Getting Things Done (GTD), an eProfessional action management method, as developed by David Allen, a productivity expert. GTD rest on the principle “that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.”

This means that not only long term goals as defined in project plans are recorded in a so-called ‘trusted system’ like a collaborative working environment, but that project members like Christine also define and store their own subprojects with related tasks for themselves that are congruent with the higher level plans.

When looking at the high level project plan in her workspace, Christine sees that she is responsible for the development of an updated cartographic map with gas station information of the Liguria region in Italy. Before doing any work she (just like the other project partners) first makes a list of all actions she thinks of that need to be done in order to accomplish the development of the updated cartographic map: she needs to check the existing map for errors, think about improved information representation, import the data into the map, discuss the result, etc., etc.

All actions are context-dependent. Some of them can only be done at work (clean desk) or at home (mow lawn), others everywhere (call John about …) or only together with a specific person (generate ideas for section 2 of deliverable H6 together with Frederique). Not only the tasks, but also their context-dependency is stored in the working environment.

In order to store all actions effectively, the collaborative working environment has, besides an agenda function, an advanced context based actionable task list function built-in that helps translating the project plan objectives into relevant sub projects and actionable tasks for each project group/member. Christine stores all actions into her workspace using this function. She can store new actions as well as access existing ones wherever she is, by using e.g. a laptop, a PDA or a mobile phone.

Just like Christine, also David, the POI-database manager, loves this new way of working: “In this way, I get everything out of my head and am able to make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up — not when it blows up!” He organizes reminders of all his projects and related next actions on them in appropriate categories (@anywhere, @work, @home, @people, etc.) and keeps his system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently (at least once a week he reviews his projects and related actions: what actions are completed, are there any new [creative] projects or actions, etc.). In this way, he can trust his intuitive choices about what he should be doing (and not doing) at any time.

Everybody in the project works this way, which has a tremendous, positive impact on task tracking and cooperation. Because all actions recorded should always have a connection with a higher level project plan, people work more focused and goal-efficient than ever before! Besides, Jeff, the project manager, gets a better insight in the status of project goals and deliverables and is aware of potential planning problems in an earlier stage than before.

By making use of the project plan and related task management solution as described above, the work coordination processes improved drastically and because of that there is less need for synchronous communication about the status of tasks, work division, etc. However, there will always be a need for synchronous communication. Based on advanced presence information (location, agenda information, etc.), people can make better choices with respect to choosing the most appropriate time and tool for synchronous communication. By making use of video conferencing tools, a lot of time and money can be saved as well (less need for formal meetings in a central location).

Before Christine can develop a new edition of the Liguria map, David needs to get the latest POI-information from several gas station representatives.

This process is standardized: gas station representatives can export their data files with gas station location information via a special portal that is part of the work environment, specially designed for uploading/updating POI information. The portal ensures that all POI information is formatted properly. This saves the cartographic company an enormous amount of time. After the export process, the data can be added to the POI-database automatically.

After finishing a first version of the Liguria map with new POI-information as well as an improved visual design, Christine would like to show the map – which is centrally stored in the collaborative working environment – to some of the gas station representatives. She used to print and send the maps by mail, but nowadays, via her workspace, she can select potentially interested project members and set a date and time for reviewing the map.

The project members automatically get an invitation and after accepting the invitation, they can discuss – via text, audio as well as videoconferencing – and review the map together. They can ‘play’ with the map (zoom in and out, rotate the map, etc.) and can also – simultaneously – add (coordination specific) notes and comments on the map.

With such an advanced collaborative working environment there is no need for sending files via e-mail – all document exchange is done via a shared workspace with advanced built-in cooperation and status tracking services. As result, print and paper costs decrease sharply. After a period of habituation, people love this new way of working. Also tools like blogs and wikis are increasingly popular for informally exchanging information.

[edit] Scenario 3: Project Planning and Team Configuration

by Kjetil Kristensen, ESoCE-NET

Valerie is a senior business executive in a company developing components for solar energy systems. Although she has left a promising academic career to become more involved in hands-on processes, she still deeply cares about the frontiers of research and the linkage between research, innovation and core business priorities.

One day on the Metro, while browsing some news stories on her next generation Smartphone delivered through RSS feed, an exciting idea suddenly emerges. A recent change in legislation could lead to very attractive business opportunities for the emerging European solar power clusters.

Who has the necessary competencies to cover those areas, and what has been published in this field before, she wonders. While still on the Metro, she activates her meta-agent that quickly starts crawling the social networks and communities she is a member of, including LinkedIn, OpenBC, the ECOSPACE Community other EU research communities and related information sources. The meta-agent uses semantic matching algorithms and returns a tagged, consolidated list of relevant hits. She quickly browses through the available tags and finds “people I know”, “my network”, “subscription services”, “open resources”, “recent news”, “related terms / expanded search” and “personal knowledge”. Altogether, the agent has returned 35 hits, after learning that Valerie generally trusts the agent’s recommendations and prefers to view only the most relevant hits.

In her network, there are only two hits. One of these is rather obvious, and she thinks “that Bob…” and shakes her head while smiling. It turns out that Bob pops up almost every time Valerie is onto something interesting. They have a long list of common interests, but still the level of consistency is remarkable. The second hit is a politician she has met at a congress twice, but never worked with. She was a bit surprised, but this hit immediately catches her attention and she marks it for further exploration together with Bob. Valerie notices that her stop is coming up, so she quickly saves the entire search results as under concepts / explore, presses “add report in workspace” and accepts a follow-up reminder in her calendar.

Back at her home office, Valerie is standing in front of her large touch screen developing some mind maps when she is reminded about the ongoing exploration. She logs into the workspace using voice commands, and the screen is automatically rearranged so that she can see the search results once again, this time next to her rather intricate mind map structure. Most of the other hits match her search terms rather accurately, but still seem to be unrelated or dealing with other aspects than the precise ones she had in mind. Being a person that likes to bring structure to the table, she hits “report ambiguous terminology”, which feeds a report into wikipedia and other search sites.

Valerie finds this rather interesting; often, people use different terms for the exact same phenomenon, having an urge to define their own concepts (not invented here), other times, people use the same terms for very different concepts. Quite a paradox, she thinks. Good thing that this semantic technology is moving forward, she thinks, maybe we can free ourselves from this terminology paradox altogether.

Back to the list. She is rather impatient, and wants to get this idea rolling – with the involvement of others. The recent development in collaborative technologies have made life a lot more simple for eProfessionals like herself, she thinks when she invites others to collaborate using the “invite others to collaborate” function from within the search report she generated on the Metro. While her meta-agent searches her potential collaborators’ calendars, a draft of the invitation is generated automatically She adds a two lines of personal text, and the agent returns the first available time slot for all (Tuesday at noon), together with a list of future events all three are attending or invited to. Valerie picks the first available time slot and submits the invitation including a search extension request to Bob and the politician, hoping they will find this interesting. After the submission, the agent asks Valerie if she would like to add an open invitation to other potential channels in related fields, matching those from the original search. She accepts, and hopes the basic idea, still in a very early stage, will end up on at least some people’s “keep me updated on this idea” list. Later that evening, both Bob and the politician accepts the invitation. They have also agreed to the search extension request, which will add content to the original search by enabling local search and search in their personal / restricted networks.

When Tuesday arrives, the agent reminds Valerie about the upcoming collaboration session, and asks her if she is interested in displaying all relevant information she has found as well as her own notes during the meeting. She accepts, and the screen is automatically reorganized according to her personal preferences and available equipment. Fortunately, she now has ample screen space available, so she creates an eCorridor and waits for the others to join. They join at the same time, and Valerie can see their faces together with personal information. In the main workspace window there is a long list of potential related items for the discussion, each item being tagged and colour coded depending on type of information and who brought it to the meeting. The "keep track of IPR" function is active, so any type of work / manipulation done from within the workspace keeps the IPR structure intact. Valerie welcomes the participants by providing a background for the invitation, and quickly moves on to explain why she thinks this could benefit a long list of companies and also prove useful for the society and the environment. The others are excited about the basic idea, and commits to do some pro bono work on this in exchange for an individual, perpetual licence to use the material for commercial and non-commercial purposes. They escalate the session by bringing in voting and whiteboard overlay, and moves on to discussion the list of resources they have created by allowing their individual agents to exchange / broker information from open and restricted sources.

The next day, two external partners Valerie has never met, joins the team after seeing an open call for collaboration published widely on Valerie's favourite channels and accepting the terms of this collaboration effort. They grant access to their own personal / restricted information sources related to the subject and add valuable content to the discussions, and within two weeks, the team has developed a plan for a multidisciplinary journal article they will submit to selected environmental journals, and later use to influence key policy makers to enforce new regulations that has potentially large benefits.

[edit] Scenario 4: Webergence

by Marc Pallot, ESoCE-NET

The scenario described below takes place in 2010. Mass publishing on the web including people exposure and feed-back solicitation (blogs, wikis) has been leading to mass interaction among individuals through social networks and on-line communities of practice or communities of knowledge. The web has been providing a virtual place of emergence where self-organised groups of individuals are collaborating towards the achievement of a common goal whatever is the size of the group from at least 2 to an infinite number of individuals.

Innovation contests are regularly published on the web. Innovation work has turned into a global innovation quest game like the famous quest for the Holly Grail. Tired workers have been replaced by very enthusiastic quest players. Traditional collective stupidity is progressively replaced by collective intelligence. The innovation quest game is to share creative ideas and disparate knowledge towards the innovation quest and no-one has any rough idea about what to really search for. Like in a fractal process, basic elements are spontaneously grouping into a new revelation form.

Ideas are submitted into an ideas’ garden, within a dedicated “BlokiSpace” (interoperable community based blogging, wiki and shared workspace), by individuals and groups under the principles of creative commons. Contributions ownership is a systematic process in this open innovation environment.

Groups are forming spontaneously by complementary knowledge, expertises and converging interests in order to ensure the proper level of diversity (Teams are not forming anymore by hierarchical dictatorial decisions or affinities). New developments are emerging on the web. Individuals are extensively exposing and soliciting feed-back on the web. Nowadays, the Open Source Software approach is being progressively replaced by global and regional co-creation living labs where all stakeholders (architects, designers, researchers, engineers, users, suppliers, policymakers, investors….) are contributing to the innovation process in forming spontaneous groups (Group Forming Networks, Reed’s law).

Individuals (eProfessionals ) are involved in several activities and networks. They are members of several communities of practice or communities of knowledge and meet physically once or twice a year during the annual conferences and workshops.

Individuals are also members of Professional Communities that are operating as innovation inductors and professional career agents within specific business areas.

Individuals are using dynamic collaborative web environments acting as a kind of media crossroad in between people (web enabled: wikis, blogs) communications within their communities of knowledge and professional communities. Most of the dialogue among players is based on the sharing of cognitive maps, through the use of concept or topic maps, in order to speed-up the way of reaching a common or shared understanding which is the key ingredient of collaboration effectiveness and efficiency.

Everyone has got, in his individual space, a systematised intellectual and social capital to play with. The people-concepts networking approach is embedded into the collaborative web environment leading to context and collaboration awareness, group life-cycle management, as well as knowledge connection. Hybrid collocation mode, based on Physual principles, is in used to better support perceptual arenas and group consciousness in order to stimulate individual’s creativity.

January 2010, Mark, an eProfessional specialised into creativity for Product and Service Innovation, is travelling to Brussels where he is going to attend a workshop dedicated to mix reality cognitive environments. Mark is member of several on-line communities of practice, also named community of knowledge, where he is regularly contributing to discussion, concepts formalisation, elaboration of joint visions and roadmaps in order to identify users’ expectations, gaps and challenges.

Nowadays, the Thalys train is fully equipped with flat screen and wireless connection enabling travellers to remain permanently web connected with their colleagues through the use of their Icom (latest evolution of the Iphone). Icom is a very small computing device offering multiplay services. Its colour screen resolution is very high; however, Mark prefers to use the larger flat screen available on the seat in connecting his Icom wirelessly with the flat screen.

He has just received an invitation to an innovation contest on new generation user interface as he is well-known for his fashionable wireless ring everyone wear on one of their fingers as a tracking device that is replacing the old-fashioned mouse. Few days ago, when he was preparing the workshop discussion with different experts he has recently met on the web, he thought already about the potential impact of mix reality technologies on cognitive environments and related user interface to facilitate shared understanding within a diversity of knowledge domains.

He considers shared understanding as the key ingredient of an effective and efficient collaboration. However, despite several conducted action research studies, the role of shared understanding has only been partially demonstrated due to the complexity of cognition mechanisms. He had several windows simultaneously opened on his large wall screens in his home office where he was simultaneously finalising his trip booking while discussing, through the use of a wireless headset, with few colleagues collocated at one of the regional living labs within a “physual” session.

The term physual is related to hybrid collocation mode and mix reality environments. It is a combination of physical and virtual collocation including visualisation through large screens and remote control on various devices.

When he is entering into his BlokiSpace with a single logon, he gets the current situation as when he has left it last night. His user interface is a contextualised environment and includes collaboration and context awareness based on cognitive maps, represented either with concept or topic maps (ISO/IEC 13250:2000), he is most frequently using. All documents are inheriting associated concepts as attributes which is enabling users to look at their documents with the most relevant view and not anymore on placing documents into a folder. It means that all documents are contextualised.

The People-concepts Networking approach is also embedded in the cognitive maps which is enabling interconnection between people and used concepts. By this way, as soon as he is selecting a concept, either community, group, project, workpackage or task, the presence frame is automatically updated according to the list of individuals (and RFID objects?) that are also involved and collaborating in this concept instance. Next coming meetings and other events frame, as well as new issued documents are also automatically updated according to the selected concepts and instances (elements defining the context).

It means that as soon as this context is properly set-up then he just needs to select an object, such as a document, and then click on “share” and this object will be automatically shared among the appropriate group of individuals. It means that access rights are automatically granted to those who need to read this document or even contribute to it.

Users do not need anymore to remember which folder to upload the document as folders have become virtually multiple and depend on the document attributes inherited from the context. This further explains why sharing access rights are directly allocated to objects (e.g. documents) rather than folders. Sharing access rights are also revocable in order to give the maximum flexibility in between private, semi-private, semi-public and public status.

Furthermore, a BlokiSpace is visualised as a browsable graphic map showing concepts, people and interrelationships that could be selected, opened and observed according to users’ needs. Different metaphoric representations are in used such as 2D hyperbolic graphs or 3D geographical map showing mountains, valleys, villages, roads, rivers and houses whose size depends on the corresponding numbers of instances.

Last but not least, he can take a look at multiple available shared workspace indicators based on log data that are systematically mined and useful for checking potential common interests, usage and current progress status. There is also a knowledge connection agent scanning the web through the use of the People-Concepts Networking approach in order to identify complementary potential collaboration opportunities to enlarge the creativity prospective circle with a relevant diversity.

Torre, another eProfessional based in Oslo and specialised in the design of hybrid collocation environment, is contacted by Mark’s knowledge connection agent as someone identified as potential interest for collaboration. He got automatically Mark’s dynamic profile link and associated cognitive maps relevant to the targeted creativity prospective.

As he is positively interested he decided to share an on-going cognitive map related to the development of the latest hybrid collocation design evolution. His BlokiSpace is immediately granting access rights to Mark and inviting him to have a look at this cognitive map before to enter into a perceptual arena (mix reality environment based on the implementation of the extended version of the JOHARI window model) where they could start their collaborative creativity prospective session jointly with Peter, a third eProfessional based in Finland and specialised in the domain of augmented reality, who has been directly invited by Mark and finally several communities’ members sharing the same interest.

As soon as Mark has been creating a concept associated with the new user interface prospective then his BlokiSpace has opened a dedicated shared workspace and invited Torre and Peter as well as other communities’ members to join it. Altogether, they are logged into this shared workspace, discussing various ideas (VoIP + Perceptual arena conferencing tool) about the way of assembling different concepts and pursuing different possible tracks (not yet paths) while the BlokiSpace is simultaneously recording contributions ownership and links with current and new concepts. After having collaboratively modelled what they think are the most relevant cognitive maps for new dynamic user interface, the knowledge connection agent starts again to scan the entire web in order to identify potential relevant complementary explicit and tacit knowledge (concepts and people), and then invite all of them to enter into the group and contribute to the new user interface prospective.

People cognitive maps, blogs, wiki contributions, tags they are spreading on the web and folksonomies or emerging taxonomy and ontology are operating like pheromones in the case of Stigmergic collaboration. All those pheromones constitute numbers of potential emergent self-organised structures, behaviours and properties revealing emergent concepts. They are also candidate alternative tracks that are followed by the knowledge connection agent. The inherent individuals’ mass exposure and feed-back solicitation on the web has naturally (emergence theory) been leading to massive interaction among people and therefore very large collaboration arenas that are currently speeding up creativity by an exponential factor.

However, the impact on innovation is less considerable due to remaining financial investment and commercialisation barriers, mainly due to the very high competitive environment, societal transition and global regulation, for transforming all those bright new concepts into concrete products and services on the market.

One of the participating community members has proposed to post an eSurvey about dynamic user interface in order to evaluate users’ expectations. Torre proposes to post another one dedicated to factors driving towards new dynamic user interface as a way of exploring users’ motivations. As everyone agrees with those 2 proposals then the group is collaboratively authoring the two eSurveys before to ask colleagues to review the overall coherence (peers review could concurrently take place).

Mark is waking-up when the water is asking him whether he would like to have his breakfast with coffee or tea.

[edit] Scenario 5: Software Development

by Viktor Kaufman, SAP

Day 1

The National Bank of Agilia (NBA) is one of the biggest in Agilia. Its CIO, Amir Pakkad, cannot afford to break new grounds carelessly. At the same time, at the last Executive Board Summit, he announced that NBA would be one of the most innovative players on the market. His team is striving for cutting edge technology and is keeping an eye on successful smaller innovative banks. He calls them Early Advisors, as it sounds similar to Early Adopters. The Early Advisors consider cognitive maps semantic technologies to be mature enough for systematic deployment.

After careful examination of the offer from IWSoft and after studying the cognitive map on their Banktelligence Services Package 1.1 solution, also called BI solution, he decides to hire the Intelligent Way Software. In the first phase, IWSoft is to improve efficiency of the Dunning Letters Department. Mia, the department leader, and Martin, the department system administrator, will collaborate with developers from IWSoft all the way through requirements analysis to the actual deployment and maintenance of BIpay. The way from requirements to maintenance used to be rather long. At IWSoft, David, an experienced development architect and project leader, takes the responsibility for assisting Mia and Martin in simplifying their work. That is what they want.

Dave wants to implement some improvements of the bank’s management of overdue payments and does not want to disappoint Mia and Martin who need the running system as soon as possible. A smile on Mia’s face and some Points for publishing a new Service are Dave’s current goals. Alone in his office, he says in a loud voice, “Assistant, log on to my computer,” and looks for a moment in the web camera also placing one finger on the touchpad. “Nice,” he thinks, “Nobody knows what combination of biometric data is used for the authentication to the Global Random Biometric and Profile Data Repository. Neither me, nor the governmental institution storing the repository with all his profile data he will ever need to get access to his computer or the NBA bank.”

Dave asks the Assistant to open the bank’s login page, glances into the camera. The Consolidation Browser, sometimes-called BlockiSpace, automatically rearranges the visible content according to his explicitly and implicitly configured preferences. Simultaneously, he asks to invite Mia and Martin to a videoconference. “Hi!” – “Hello Dave, let me just focus the same view you currently have… oh, I usually have a totally different layout, I suggest you move all the client data to the left, trust me, the default configuration is not very convenient.” She goes on explaining the layout while Martin makes short remarks on the infrastructure behind the scene. This way it is a bit faster than if Dave himself would focus, move, expand and collapse the self-explanatory content annotated with cognitive maps with an adjustable level of details. Dave is mainly interested in semantic descriptions of the software architecture of the bank department and hopes that it would be possible to integrate his Services in this architecture automatically. – “Skip the reddish reporting functionality,” adds Martin.

Each member of Mia’s team has to document debtors’ reactions to their calls, in which they remind about the due rate payments. Mia has to review about 10000 such notes a day. She would rather like to see the notes of employees with lowest payback effectiveness only. From her experience, one can further judge about the quality of customers’ treatment according to certain semantic patterns in the notes. “If I could see only the relevant information, I could spend more time teaching new colleagues…”

“That’s why we are Intelligent Way,” – replies Dave. He has done a similar task in a different context, for one automotive company. That Service had intuitively a very similar functionality. “Was it in May? ...Let us try “automotive” …or better I try to match the cognitive maps of the involved bank infrastructure with those of input parameters in our Services Repository… Here it is!”

Chat space pops up. “Hi Dominic, here is Dave. Can you please extend the cognitive maps of the input parameters for one Service (the link is below) according to the new context, so that other banks can find their favourite terminology later? “– “Sure, as usual, I use the standard ontology dictionaries, give me 20 minutes. …Why chatting? Is your desktop full again?” – “No, I’m in a Video Session. I need to bind the Service input and output in our client’s infrastructure and customize a bit. Talk to you later.”

“Ok, Mia, here is your prototype. What do you say?” Mia starts adjusting the layout, but suddenly exclaims, “These are all notes of my team members with lower effectiveness, but I wanted only the problematic notes, perhaps, in a different place!” Dave explains that conceptualizing her experience requires a professional and that he is currently trying to contact somebody from one partner institution. “Dr. Alex Brooks, how do you do, remember we worked on semantic patterns recognition Services project together? Please meet Mia and Martin from NBA. It looks like right now you are the only available professional for their problem. I think we need your help.” – “Sorry, Dave, I’m pretty busy, you better submit a task request in the professional community.” – “Wait a second, Alex, I promised to deliver timely. What if I give you 0.1 extra Point per usage in addition to our Partner Agreement Rate?” – “I do not know, Dave, let me see, if I can shift one appointment.” – “Thank you indeed! You will get my request to adjust the Points logging data right away.”

During the next two hours, Mia and Alex elaborated on criteria to find problematic notes. Finally, Alex has composed a specialized bundle of Services out of many other basic Services. It would have lasted much longer without the newest version of the Service for automatic matching and semantic adjusting of cognitive maps at the composition stage. You have to spend a bit more Points for each access to the newest version, but it pays off; and the market Points price is affordable.

In England, it is teatime now. “Is there still a lot to do for NBA, Dave?” – “My internship student is bundling our extraction Service with the one Dr. Brooks is currently working on. Then, I just have to publish the result and, may be, provide for some marketing. Our company transfers 10% of the Points revenues to our Points account, you know.” – Dominic starts giggling, “Dave, I hope, your student is not going to use the remote Service summing two numbers again! It still costs 0.001 Points.” – “Have you forgotten, how you started with us a year ago? The student helps me a lot.” – “Just kidding, Dave.” David smiled. A year ago, when he and others established the Consortium “Service Points as Money in the Goals Era”, nobody could imagine that Labour Party would seriously discuss this law regulating the activities of the Consortium together with the exchange rate between Points and Euro.

Day 2

Next morning, David was waiting for a call from Mr. Pakkad’s office. He tried to guess what would be his next task. The Assistant was crawling through the Internet, was building Services index, was updating log-files, was deleting too old versions of shared documents, or was trying to propose cognitive maps to describe old not annotated Web Services. Whatever it was doing, it stopped for a second in order to play an mpeg4 - video - call.

It was not Mr. Pakkad’s office. It was Mia. She smiled. “Thank you, Dave. Yesterday I could review all notes much faster. Everything works well, I have chosen a very convenient layout and theme. I just wanted to add, sometimes my team members write fake notes. And for complicated cases, I would like the calls to be redirected to my assistants or to me. Then, our new employees could observe me and learn. Would be nice to have a dashboard with the faces of my team members, so that I could choose somebody to observe his or her work and give them feedback in a personal videoconference later. I also need to know who is out of office. And then, some automatic statistics generation. Mr. Pakkad supports this. I could work part-time then. Also, our team members require some…”

“Wait a second, Mia, please!” He tried to structure his thoughts, “we need to cluster Mia’s requirements like we cluster the results of our Services search queries. Then, we have to capture the different contexts for the requirements and update everything continuously as we proceed.” He enlarged the Assistant’s view and typed, “IWSoft is looking for an experienced Tropos professional for a period of one or two months.” He confirmed that this was a cross-organizational job offer for an ICT or Business professional. He also confirmed that IWSoft got 9 Points from the government plus 1 Point to his own Points account.

Leading expert in multi-purpose software development Prof. Sorenson teaching Tropos course at the University of Sorento did not get David’s job offer, since his Assistant was blocking all requests of attention, if they were not from his students or colleagues. Dave could not know that, since he rarely looked in his log-files. He smiled to Mia, “we come back to you soon.” In the meantime, two more banks were using his published Services.

[edit] new ECOSPACE survey on collaboration barriers and enablers

You are kindly invited to take part in the second and third ECOSPACE surveys:

• collaboration barriers
• collaboration enablers

Both are an electronic survey where responding to the eSurvey means voting into the different polls organised through the structural, social, technical and legal dimensions. As usual, it doesn't take a while to complete, based on your own collaboration experience, both eSurveys.

Thanks per advance for your valuable contribution. Resulting figures are available without to necessarily have to respond (just to avoid someone is droping any response just to get access to the resulting figures). Furthermore, as it is done within the framework of the Wiki community under "Creative Commons", not only all resulting figures are always available but the analysis will also be available as an article (as for the previous ECOSPACE eSurvey) in one of the next ECOSPACE newsletters

[edit] IJeC Call-for-Paper

The Call-for-Papers of the International Journal on eCollaboration (IJeC) special issue on Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) is open and waiting for your contribution.

Constantly changing customer demands and intense global competitive environment imposes the compelling need to better support knowledge workers, operating as eProfessionals, especially within creativity sessions and innovation tasks while increasing inter-personal productivity in order to remain competitive on the global market. As a consequence, working organisation is shifting towards networked individuals driven simultaneously by the necessity of focusing on core competency while stimulating the emergence of creative ideas and breakthrough innovation. These in turn push organisations and individuals to implement new ways of working and interacting among diverse competency fields that require more effective and efficient collaboration approaches and Collaborative Working Environments (CWE).

For this special issue we are looking for papers that address issues associated with CWE. Examples of such topics also include (but are not limited to):

• Distributed collaborative work environment tools: development and use
• Reference Architectures for CWE
• Field Studies of use and introduction
• Project Management using CWE
• Community building in CWE
• Awareness in collaboration processes
• Factors affecting collaboration and impacting CWE design
• Interoperability of Collaboration Tools
• The use of Web Semantic in CWE: developments and experiences
• Using Ubiquity Environments for CWE
• Knowledge Management through the use of CWE
• Modelling business processes for CWE
• Using Virtual Organizations in CWE: descriptions and experiences

Important dates Below are tentative dates for all the main steps involved in the production and publication of the Special Issue:

• October 15, 2007: All submissions are due to the guest editors.
• February 1, 2008: Decisions and review comments are sent to authors.
• April 1, 2008: Revised and resubmitted manuscripts are sent back out for review.
• May 1, 2008: Final decision letters are sent to authors.
• June 1, 2008: Final revised manuscripts are due to Editor.
• September 1, 2008: Special Issue goes to Idea Group for publication.
• October 1, 2008: Proofs go to authors.
• December 1, 2008: Special Issue is published.

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Published by:

ECOSPACE Newsletter is published by: ECOSPACE Consortium

Editorial Coordinator: Marc Pallot, ESoCE-NET

Editorial Board: Wolfgang Prinz, Antonio Marquès, Marc Pallot

ECOSPACE Newsletter is supported by: European Commission FP6-IST-5 35208, ECOSPACE Integrated Project