P2P InterCoop: P2P-based Decentralised Inter-organizational Cooperation - Motivations and Requirements

As the global marketplace becomes more and more competitive, corporations often need to cooperate in order to utilize the best of their resources for achieving their common business goals. This kind of collaboration gives a corporation a possibility to use the capabilities of their business partners that they do not currently have. In addition, mergers, acquisitions, alliances, and market demands are some of the reasons why companies have distributed work across geographically separated sites. Although P2P systems are emerging as a new form of distributed architecture, the centralized architecture of the existing collaborative environments has major drawbacks. This paper presents a new architecture called P2P InterCoop for supporting distributed cooperative work; it identifies basic requirements, advantages and limitations

Performance in collaborative activity: contribution of intersubjectivity theory

Collaboration at work is a key component for activities in complex socio-technical systems. Reviewing the scientific literature showed that collaborative work activity has been well characterized, showing that perspective-taking is a crucial feature, but no study quantifies what makes the performance of collaborative activity. Analyzing performance during work activity inevitably refers to Cognitive Task Analysis paradigm (CTA). Based on digital ethnography and Intersubjectivity Theory, the study was undertaken in a nuclear power plant where cooperative activities were analyzed using a CTA process tracing method: whilst performing their activity, workers wore a miniature camera at the eye-level to record their activity from the first-person perspective and were then involved in a reflexive analysis of the activity. Results led to introduce the concept of “coherent perspective-taking” and demonstrated that it was the main variable explaining collaborative performance for cooperative activities. The related theoretical process is discussed and organizational factors favoring coherent perspective-taking are identified

Child Abuse Investigations: How CPS and Law Enforcement Engage in Collaboration

Child welfare social workers (CPS) and law enforcement professionals are the sole professional groups in California assigned the task of investigating child physical and sexual abuse allegations. Both professional groups report that child-well-being is the ultimate outcome desired when addressing the needs of vulnerable and “at risk” children. Despite this shared vision CPS and law enforcement professionals also described competing outcomes that are often contradictory; particularly in how each group characterizes different professional responsibilities in achieving child well-being. For example, CPS describes the dual responsibilities of preventing children from further harm while at the same time identifying factors that led to the abuse and providing non-punitive services aimed at preserving and strengthening family ties; including maintaining the children safely in their homes whenever possible. On the other hand, law enforcement’s view of child abuse as a crime shapes their perception of how things are handled. Law enforcement has the responsibility for collecting criminal evidence that frequently results in the offending parent being prosecuted and spending time in jail, possibly dismantling the family unit. Understanding how these two professional groups collaborate to execute their conflicting, professional responsibilities forms the overall focus of this study. Child welfare social workers and law enforcement professionals were recruited from Riverside and San Bernardino Counties to participate in the study. Theoretical sampling, snowball sampling, and convenience sampling techniques were used to ensure that data was collected from a minimum of 20 participants who were identified as subject matter experts. Data was collected through face-to-face interviews using semi-structured interview guides. Transcribed interviews were entered into the QSR*NVIVO 8 software program for data management and to provide an audit trail. Seven major themes emerged from the data. Findings revealed that CPS and law enforcement professionals do not collaborate; they cooperate and coordinate on an inconsistent basis. Overall, dissimilar professional standards engendered conflict and negative perceptions of each other producing poor working relationships. However, the research revealed that the working relationship between the two entities seems to improve when they are co-located/share the same physical workplace. More research is recommended to determine if such working arrangement impacts collaboration

Coordination and Collaboration Activities in Cooperative Information Systems

The notions of coordination, collaboration and cooperation have originated a number of heterogeneous research lines in diverse scientific areas, both inside and outside Computer Science — along with a number of different acceptations for the terms as well. The basic and almost obvious correlation between these terms, however, has not yet led to a satisfactory scientific overall picture that could put them in the right perspective, emphasising their commonalities and distinctions. Still, there is a great potential for cross-fertilisation between the different strands of work. In particular, if the mutual relationship between these terms was understood and commonly accepted, it would be much easier to adapt and apply many innovative ideas developed by the different communities to the field of Cooperative Information Systems. In this article, we outline a possible unified conceptual framework, by suitably re-interpreting findings from by Activity Theory: there, a clear definition for both coordination and cooperation as collaborative activities can be found and used as a reference, which is centred around the notion of (coordination) artifact. Then, we gladly introduce four contributions, selected from the best papers of the 18th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing and suitably revised for the International Journal on Cooperative Information Systems, that show how some of the most recent results of the research on coordination can be fruitfully exploited and applied to the field of Cooperative Information Systems