Support for Workflows in a Ministerial Environment

This paper presents the POLlTeam solutions and experiences with the support of ministerial workflows by electronic circulation folders. An application scenario is presented that 'illustrates the user actions and cooperation that occur during the processing of a ministerial workflow. This scenario is afterwards examined to identify essential requirements for a computer based support of such processes. Based on that this paper describes the design of an electronic circulation folder and how this is augmented by a support for digital signatures, the integration of paper documents and a video conferencing system to satisfy the major user requirements

Enhancing Workflows by Web Technology

This paper presents a hybrid approach for the support of workflows in a ministerial environment that integrates a Web-based interface into a groupware platform. A scenario of the application area is examined to identify the basic requirements for an adequate user support. The basic PoLffeam approach for the support of workflows by electronic circulation folders is introduced. Focal point of the paper is the design of the Web-based interface for the interaction with electronic circulation folders and its seamless integration into the groupware platform

CloudTeams: Enabling Tight Collaboration between Customers and Software Developers: Presentation held at European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, ECSCW 2015, Oslo, Norway, September 19-23, 2015

The main challenge addressed by CloudTeams is bridging the communication and collaboration gap between software developers and end users throughout the whole software development process in order to develop better software. CloudTeams solves the problem by bringing together software developers and end users into one platform, thus providing a seamless environment where interaction with customers will feel natural and will validate the software product. It integrates popular software development tools and services by mashing them up with common practices. A sustainable community of end users provides their activity data through their avatars to the development teams at any stage of the software development cycle, from idea generation to beta testing

SAIRA – The Open Innovation Hub for Sustainable Development

Global challenges like climate change, food security, and infectious diseases such as the COVID-19 pandemic are nearly impossible to tackle when established experts and upstart innovators work in silos. If research organizations, governments, universities, NGOs, and the private sector could collaborate on these challenges more easily, lasting solutions would certainly come more quickly. Aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, SAIRA connects key players in different arenas: scientists and engineers at research and technology organizations (RTOs) looking to collaborate on sustainable development projects, companies seeking R&D support to tackle their most challenging problems, and startups with innovative ideas and a desire to scale. The platform is a blockchain-secured open innovation platform, anchored on Max Plank Digital Library's blockchain network bloxberg, that assures the authenticity and integrity of all user-generated content and collaboration processes

Blockchain for Education: Lifelong Learning Passport

Certificates play an important role in education and in professional development in companies. Individual learning records become essential for people’s professional careers. It is therefore important that these records are stored in long-term available and tamper-proof ledgers. A blockchain records transactions in a verifiable and permanent way, therefore it is very suitable to store fingerprints of certificates or other educational items. Blockchain reveals forgery of certificates and it supports learning histories. In this paper, we present the Blockchain for Education platform as a practical solution for issuing, validating and sharing of certificates. At first, we describe the conceptual system overview and then we present in detail the platform implementation including management of certification authorities and certificates, smart contracts as well as services for certifiers, learners and third parties such as employers. Finally, we describe use cases and first evaluation results that we gathered from end user tests with certifiers and conclude with a discussion