The future of enterprise groupware applications

This paper provides a review of groupware technology and products. The purpose of this review is to investigate the appropriateness of current groupware technology as the basis for future enterprise systems and evaluate its role in realising, the currently emerging, Virtual Enterprise model for business organisation. It also identifies in which way current technological phenomena will transform groupware technology and will drive the development of the enterprise systems of the future

Survivor: An Approach for Adding Dependability to Legacy Workflow Systems

Although they often provide critical services, most workflow systems are not dependable. There has been much literature on dependable/survivable distributed systems; most is concerned with developing new architectures, not adapting pre-existing ones. Additionally, the literature is focused on hardening, security-based defense, as opposed to recovery. For deployed systems, it is often infeasible to completely replace existing infrastructures; what is more pragmatic are ways in which existing distributed systems can be adapted to offer better dependability. In this paper, we outline a general architecture that can easily be retrofitted to legacy workflow systems in order to improve dependability and fault tolerance. We do this by monitoring enactment and replicating partial workflow states as tools for detection, analysis and recovery. We discuss some policies that can guide these mechanisms. Finally, we describe and evaluate our implementation, Survivor, which modified an existing workflow system provided by the Naval Research Lab

PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities

The software behind online community platforms encodes a governance model that represents a strikingly narrow set of governance possibilities focused on moderators and administrators. When online communities desire other forms of government, such as ones that take many members' opinions into account or that distribute power in non-trivial ways, communities must resort to laborious manual effort. In this paper, we present PolicyKit, a software infrastructure that empowers online community members to concisely author a wide range of governance procedures and automatically carry out those procedures on their home platforms. We draw on political science theory to encode community governance into policies, or short imperative functions that specify a procedure for determining whether a user-initiated action can execute. Actions that can be governed by policies encompass everyday activities such as posting or moderating a message, but actions can also encompass changes to the policies themselves, enabling the evolution of governance over time. We demonstrate the expressivity of PolicyKit through implementations of governance models such as a random jury deliberation, a multi-stage caucus, a reputation system, and a promotion procedure inspired by Wikipedia's Request for Adminship (RfA) process.Comment: to be published in ACM UIST 202

Supporting security-oriented, inter-disciplinary research: crossing the social, clinical and geospatial domains

How many people have had a chronic disease for longer than 5-years in Scotland? How has this impacted upon their choices of employment? Are there any geographical clusters in Scotland where a high-incidence of patients with such long-term illness can be found? How does the life expectancy of such individuals compare with the national averages? Such questions are important to understand the health of nations and the best ways in which health care should be delivered and measured for their impact and success. In tackling such research questions, e-Infrastructures need to provide tailored, secure access to an extensible range of distributed resources including primary and secondary e-Health clinical data; social science data, and geospatial data sets amongst numerous others. In this paper we describe the security models underlying these e-Infrastructures and demonstrate their implementation in supporting secure, federated access to a variety of distributed and heterogeneous data sets exploiting the results of a variety of projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow

The impact of groupware and CSCW on group collaboration : an overview of success factors in CSCW

Organizations continuously explore new ways of supporting group collaboration. Group dynamics changed the moment organizations started to operate globally. Groups started to collaborate from different locations, and this caused the emergence of virtual teams and agile work. Microsoft is one of the companies that promises to support this new way of group collaboration. Organizations need new systems that connect distributed teams around the world. Groupware are computer-based systems that support groups of participants to achieve a common task in a shared environment. The focus of groupware is mainly on how the technology supports group collaboration. However, the technology alone is not interesting enough to be researched. The success of group collaboration is dependent on many more variables besides technology. Computersupported cooperative work (CSCW) is a research area that discusses the intersection between collaborative group behavior and computer-based technologies. It focusses on group behavior, group interaction, the work environment, and how computer-based systems can support those aspects. Even though CSCW was developed in the 1980s, it is still relevant today. The main research question of this paper is to find success factors of CSCW that support group collaboration. To answer the research question, literature is being reviewed, groupware is measured in use cases and interviews are conducted with Microsoft employees specialized in group collaboration systems. Results show that to support group collaboration, organizations should focus on active and dynamic participation of group members. Distributed organizations pulled groups apart and Passive group meetings in conference rooms are outdated and discourage collaboration. In addition, organizations must provide proper groupware to support common ground, grounding and group interaction

Supporting awareness in heterogeneous collaboration environments

Rapid technological advancements have made it possible for humans to collaborate as never before. However demands of group work necessitate distributed collaboration in very heterogeneous environments. Heterogeneity as in various applications, platforms, hardware and communication infrastructure. User mobility, lack of availability and cost often make imposing a common collaboration environment infeasible. Awareness is essential for successful collaboration. Awareness is a key design criterion in groupware but often collaboration occurs with applications not designed to support useful awareness. This dissertation deals with the issue of effective group awareness support in heterogeneous environments.;Awareness propagation is effective if the appropriate amount of information, relevant to the user\u27s sphere of activity is delivered in a timely, unobtrusive fashion. Thus issues such as information overload, and distraction have to be addressed. Furthermore ability to establish the appropriate balance between awareness and privacy is essential. Enhanced forms of awareness such as intersubjectivity and historical awareness are often invaluable. Heterogeneous environments significantly impact the above quality factors impeding effective awareness propagation. Users are unable to tailor the quality of awareness received.;Heterogeneity issues that affect awareness quality are identified. An awareness framework is proposed that binds various sources of awareness information. However for effective awareness support, physical integration must be augmented by information integration. As a solution, an awareness model is proposed. Specification of the awareness model and framework\u27s architecture and features is the key contribution. The proposed model has been validated through simulations of realistic collaboration involving human participation. Scenarios created, have tested the model\u27s usefulness in enhancing the quality of group work by propagating effective awareness among users. To accomplish the same, an Awareness Simulator application has been created. In the validation process, efforts made to create an experimental methodology revealed some techniques related to awareness evaluation in CSCW, which are proposed. Various issues required to successfully engineer such awareness frameworks are identified and their impact on requirements such as security and performance, discussed. With various standards and technologies that can be harnessed to create awareness frameworks, there is great promise that barriers in heterogeneous collaboration environments can be overcome

Report of the user requirements and web based access for eResearch workshops

The User Requirements and Web Based Access for eResearch Workshop, organized jointly by NeSC and NCeSS, was held on 19 May 2006. The aim was to identify lessons learned from e-Science projects that would contribute to our capacity to make Grid infrastructures and tools usable and accessible for diverse user communities. Its focus was on providing an opportunity for a pragmatic discussion between e-Science end users and tool builders in order to understand usability challenges, technological options, community-specific content and needs, and methodologies for design and development. We invited members of six UK e-Science projects and one US project, trying as far as possible to pair a user and developer from each project in order to discuss their contrasting perspectives and experiences. Three breakout group sessions covered the topics of user-developer relations, commodification, and functionality. There was also extensive post-meeting discussion, summarized here. Additional information on the workshop, including the agenda, participant list, and talk slides, can be found online at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/685/ Reference: NeSC report UKeS-2006-07 available from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2006-07.pd

Computer-Supported Collaborative Production

This paper proposes the concept of collaborative production as a focus of concern within the general area of collaborative work. We position the concept with respect to McGrath's framework for small group dynamics and the more familiar collaboration processes of awareness, coordination, and communication (McGrath 1991). After reviewing research issues and computer-based support for these interacting aspects of collaboration, we turn to a discussion of implications for how to design improved support for collaborative production. We illustrate both the challenges of collaborative production and our design implications with a collaborative map-updating scenario drawn from the work domain of geographical information systems