IJeC CfP
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Contents |
[edit] Collaborative Work Environments
A Special Issue of the Journal: International Journal of e-Collaboration (IJeC)
Call for Papers
[edit] Guest editors
- Antonia Martínez-Carreras, University of Murcia
- Marc Pallot, ESoCE-NET
- Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
[edit] IJeC editor
- Ned Kock, Texas A&M International University
[edit] Topics
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).
Future CWE will most probably be characterized by flexibility, mobility, contextual adaptability and ad hoc communication requirements. This raises additional demands on flexible collaboration support for intra and inter-organizational communication and cooperation processes. It requires a shift from application oriented developments towards the design of collaboration-aware work environments that support cooperation and interaction in terms of activities rather than technical functions.
However, compared to this vision most of our daily cooperation processes are supported using telephone or email with an increasing use of instant messaging. More advanced systems that support distributed task management, shared workspaces or workflows, or real-time collaboration are still in their early adaptor phase compared to the use of email. This leads to the effect that complex and rich cooperation processes are narrowed through simple communication applications. This results in a cognitive overload of the users. Although the tools should support users in organizing their work, people often complain about information and communication overload and the disturbance of work. Therefore, concepts for a semantic-rich cooperation support to reduce the workload and complexity of monitoring and organizing the collaboration with different partners in multiple projects and processes are needed. The goal of these concepts is to enable users for more creative and knowledge producing tasks.
There are a number of factors affecting collaboration effectiveness and efficiency that are not only related to technical aspects but are also related to structural, legal and social aspects. After all, collaboration is also about individuals working together and this is a context in which it is well-known that interpersonal relationships, trust and ownership could constitute a major barrier if they are overlooked. Therefore, designing new CWE implies to properly address all factors affecting collaboration effectiveness and efficiency. Due to the increase in inter-organizational cooperation, users form groups from small team up to large communities across organizational boundaries and even sometimes involving individuals as external contributors.
This raises the issue of standardization and integration of collaboration tools in a collaboration middleware. Currently email is almost the only communication media that supports inter-organizational cooperation between different systems. Instant messaging, shared workspace systems, or application sharing have not yet reached a status where systems of different vendors can easily be integrated or combined. Thus, often the first decision an inter-organizational team or community has to make is the selection of the supporting collaboration environment. Since users are often involved in different groups, they have to learn and use different collaboration applications for different teams and processes, and to consolidate their own role, tasks, and information across them. Again, this increases workload and complexity and it reduces the availability for more creative activities.
Current research in CWE aims to study and overcome these problems by applying a paradigm shift from simple cooperation services – currently often stand-alone applications – to user and activity oriented cooperation environment. This implies that we design collaboration applications based on an analysis of the collaboration activities of users in their working environment and related factors.
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
[edit] 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.
[edit] Submission guidelines
All submissions must be in English, and should represent the original work of the authors. Improved versions of papers previously published in conference proceedings are welcome, provided that no copyright limitations exist. Submissions must be made electronically via e-mail to Marc Pallot (marc.pallot@esoce.net). The manuscript should be included as an attachment in MS Word format.
Manuscripts should be between 4000 and 6000 words in length. Submissions should include the following:
- (a) On the subject of the e-mail message: the text “Manuscript submission” followed by the title of the manuscript being submitted. Please do not include any character (@#$%^&, etc) in the title.
- (b) On the body of the e-mail message, for each author: Name, university/organization affiliation, e-mail, mailing address, phone/fax numbers. Please indicate who the contact person is for the submission.
- (c) On the paper: Submission title, an abstract of the submission, the main body of the submission, references and/or bibliography.
Please do not include the name of the authors or any information that would allow for their identification on the paper. Reviews will be blind. All paper submissions and the submission review process will be managed through e-mail. The receipt of submissions will be quickly confirmed by e-mail. Submitted manuscripts must be written in the APA (American Psychological Association) editorial style. References should relate only to material cited within the manuscript and be listed in alphabetical order, including the author's name, complete title of the cited work, title of the source, volume, issue, year of publication, and pages cited. Please do not include any abbreviations. Information on camera-ready copy preparation will be provided to submitting authors upon acceptance.
[edit] About the guest editors
Antonia Martínez-Carreras has a PhD in computer science from the University of Murcia (Spain). She is a Teaching Assistant Professor for Collaborative Environments at the University of Murcia. She also participates as a teacher in the Master Information and Communication Technologies and Telematics, teaching in the course New Paradigms for Building Information Systems. Her research area is devoted to Cooperative Systems, CSCW, Groupware, CSCL and Interoperability issues. She has been working in the Department of Information and Communication Engineering since 1999 until now, where she was involved in several research projects funded by the European IST such as ITCOLE, COLAB and ECOSPACE, a contract to act as a consultant in a Leonardo Project Replika and some funded by the Spanish Foundation Seneca and the Spanish Education and Science Ministry. She has published several papers in national and international conference and journals.
Marc Pallot is member of the Board of Directors and responsible for Collaborative Work and Infrastructure at ESoCE-Net. He is also research associate at the University of Nottingham and teaching Collaborative Innovation at ISTIA, University of Angers, within several masters' degrees dedicated to innovation. He has an extensive multi-disciplinary experience in various fields such as Collaboration Engineering (Wiki, community blogging, and shared workspace), Business Process Improvement, Community Building, Project Management, Concurrent Engineering (CE), System Engineering (SE) and CAD/CAM/PDM/PLM. He is carrying out research in the domain of future collaborative environments and more specifically on People-Concepts Networking, Knowledge Connection and Collaboration Awareness. He is regularly involved in European research projects and has published numbers of papers and co-authored several books. He has 15 years industrial experience within product marketing & engineering. He was formerly Vice-President for Product Marketing & Engineering at Win Technology, a software house specialised in Workflow and Product Data Management. He is co-founder and co-organiser of the annual ICE international conference since 1994 and member of various conference committees.
Wolfgang Prinz has a PhD in computer science from the University of Nottingham. He is a director at Fraunhofer FIT (Institute for Applied Information Technology), division manager of the CSCW research department in FIT, and Professor for cooperation systems at the Technical University in Aachen. He is carrying out research in the area of Cooperative Systems, CSCW, Groupware, Communityware and Information systems. He participated in and managed several COST, ESPRIT, IST and national research projects. Wolfgang Prinz published more 100 papers and is member of a number of conference committees: Programme Chair of ECSCW’97, Co-Chair of GROUP’97 (ACM), Programme Co-Chair of WACC’99 (ACM) and M&C 2002, Co-Chair of E-CSCW 2001, member of the editorial board of the International Journal of CSCW (Kluwer), vice-chair of the Special Interest Group on CSCW of the German Informatics Society (GI), and he was chair of ACM SIGGROUP until 2004.
[edit] Contact Information for the special Issue editors
- amart@dif.um.es (Antonia Martínez-Carreras)
- marc.pallot@esoce.net
- wolfgang.prinz@fit.fraunhofer.de
