ECOSPACE
Towards an Integrated Collaboration
Space for eProfessionals
VRE-CWE Workshop, Edinburgh, 23 May 2007
Marc Pallot, ESoCE-NET
Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer-FIT
marc.pallot@esoce.net
wolfgang.prinz@fit.fraunhofer.de
ECOSPACE Partners
18 innovation partners from 10 countries:
Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, UK
Research
© ECOSPACE Project
Industry
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
Living Lab
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eProfessionals require more than a multitude of
communication channels and applications!
ECOSPACE INNOVATION CONCEPT
User-Centric Interoperability
Activity-Task Integration
source: Harrison, et. al.; ACM GROUP 2005
Group
Forming
Networks
eProfessionals collaboration
scenario example
eGroup 1
eGroup 2
eGroup 1
Sharing knowledge
and activities
Creative Ideas &
Content Development
System-Centric Interoperability
Application-Service Integration
© ECOSPACE Project
eProfessional
• Employed or independent
professional
• Works in several projects,
often mobile
• Relies on IT for
collaboration
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
Weakly structured
workflows
Discovering collaboration
opportunities
Professional
Virtual
Communities
Group
Forming
Networks
eGroup 3
2
Achieving a collaboration environment through an integration and
interoperability middleware and new collaboration support
applications
ECOSPACE INTEROPERABILITY
ECOSPACE collaboration
space for eProfessionals
Activity-based
Collaboration Applications
Basic client collaboration
services
Open Collaboration Service Bus
Document
Management
(e.g. BSCW)
Virtual
Project
Management
(e.g. SAP)
Messaging
(e.g. Open
Source)
Conferencing
(e.g. Arel)
Collaboration Services Group A
© ECOSPACE Project
Interoperability
Bridge
Open Collaboration Service Bus
Document
Management
(e.g. BC)
Workflow
Management
(e.g. TXT)
Virtual
Presence
(e.g. Jaytown)
Collaboration
Base
Functionality
(e.g. Euro-Tax)
Collaboration Services Group B
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Interoperability and semantic integration will lead to an
activity based collaboration support
seamless
sharing
Cooperation
Awareness
Collaboration
awareness
Semantic
Integration
Cooperation
Services
© ECOSPACE Project
Task management
and monitoring
Ambient Intelligent
Collaboration
ad hoc
collaboration-service
composition
Interoperability
Group/Community
life cycle management
virtual presence
Collaboration
aware objects
activity based collaboration support
Service-Integration (SOA, P2P, client-server)
Conferencing
Shared
Workspaces
Instant
Messaging
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
Presence
Content
Mgmt
4
The living lab demonstrations cover key collaboration
challenges for validity and easy transfer into other domains
: Middleware and Services
Collaboration Tools
Reference Implementation at CeTIM, specific services and
tools configured according to respective living lab needs
LIVING LAB CONCEPT
Methodology and Cross Case Evaluation
Infrastructure set-up and maintenance
User Training
Scale up in users and to
other domains:
Project Mgt
Lab
Atkins
+ BC/FIT
Engineering design and
execution, also in remote
locations
Media
Lab
DeAgostini
+ TXT/HP
Publishing workflow with
rich media exchange and
sharing
●Labs cover broad
spectrum of collaboration
scenarios relevant to other
domains (e.g. education,
health, field maintenance)
ESoCE
+ FIT
Liaison, virtual team
composition and project
collaboration in complex
domains
●Partners already in contact
with other users for
demon-strations/ exploitation (SPS, Aladin Network)
Professional
Community
Lab
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M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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ECOSPACE takes a new innovation approach driven by
technology co-creation between users and developers
COMPARISON OF INNOVATION APPROACHES
Traditional Innovation Approach
ECOSPACE Innovation Approach
● Technical functionality perspective
● Systemic perspective of eProfessional ways
of working, business context and technology
● User involvement limited to set
examples and their validation
● Waterfall development of major
releases
● User involvement from day 1 through cocreation in Living Labs (EAR)
● Fast idea push-pull experimentation cycles
based on real-life settings and evolving
technology
Early innovation phase:
Idea generation
Idea funnel
(Selection driven)
© ECOSPACE Project
Later innovation phase:
Evaluation and
commercialisation
Idea diamond
(Co-creation driven)
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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ECOSPACE Workpackage Structure
WP6 – Exploitation & Dissemination
WP7 - Project Management
WP5 – eProfessionals Living-Lab Innovation & Evaluation
(includes Training and Demonstration activities)
Complex
Project
Management
Lab
(Atkins)
Media
Lab
(De Agostini)
Professional
Community
lab
(FIT + EsoCE)
WP4 – collaboration tools
WP3 - Collaboration Middleware & services
WP2 – Collaborative Platform Architecture
WP1 - eProfessionals Workplace Analysis,
(includes innovative concepts and methods)
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M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Back to the old Design Office era
A view of the past with almost no ICT and collocation of resources
© ECOSPACE Project
•
Group of Professionals
•
No IT
•
“All” collaboration collocated
•
No external collaboration
•
No open innovation
•
All in-house solutions
•
No automation
•
Long lead times / long period of time to
mature data
•
Physical dimension of working
environment important (“physical
workplace orchestration)
•
Physical workspaces discipline-specific
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Nowadays: eBusiness and Internet era
Collaboration from a distance becomes more and more a day-to-day reality
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M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Collaboration constitutes 36% of
overall corporate performance
•
Working remotely
•
Use numbers of tools
•
Low level of interoperability
•
Technical burden (complexity)
•
On-line social networking
•
On-line communities
•
VoI (e.g. Skype)
•
Shared workspace
•
Wiki and Blog
9
Collaborative Web Environments (CWE)
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Shared Workspace (BSCW), Wiki (Mediawiki), Blogging (Drupal)
Interwiki Links to access BSCW
Common Design
Single User Database - Common
Profile
Drupal
Single-Sign Login
BSCW
MediaWiki
Automatic Update of Wiki Templates
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M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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CWE
Interoperability
Single logon
Single profile page
Group categories for wiki articles
and blog entries
Concept (article) wiki pages
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M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Open-content License
Enables readers to use the contributed content freely which
makes the site more useful and attractive
Ensures the site may continue to keep collaboratively authored
content
Motivates authors by guaranteeing their contributions won't be
misused/stolen
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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ECOSPACE Goals
● Create new Collaboration Concepts and Scenarios
● Develop a Reference Architecture for Cooperative Working
Environments
● Develop a Collaboration Protocol
● Create new Collaboration Tools
● Set-up eProfessional Living Labs to co-create new concepts and tools
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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eProfessional?
An eProfessional:
● Is linked to a normal organisation by employment, but may also act in a
self-employed way. The work is often performed at mobile workplace.
● Is involved in many different projects within groups, communities,
projects, and with external partners in different organisations.
● Requires the availability of the workplace in different situations, locations
and places and the ad hoc availability of a cooperation environment.
● Requires support for the ad hoc identification of other eProfessionals
based on similar interest and complementary knowledge.
● Requires the dynamic ad hoc creation of collaboration with different
people and groups
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-professional
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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eProfessionals Categorisation
There are numbers of possible criteria to categorise eProfessionals:
Employment type
● Single employment, self-employed, multi-employment
Work Settings (Mobility)
● Sedentarily style, nomadic style
Activity type
● Single activity, multi-activity
Organisation/configuration type
● Hierarchical, project-centric, matrix, self-organised
Externality
● No community membership, professional community, #community memberships
Technology
● Fixed set of tools & technologies, flexible T&T environment, security constraints
Knowledge (eProfessionals are knowledge workers)
● explicit knowledge, Tacit knowledge
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Research Questions?
How do eProfessionals collaborate in an effective and efficient way?
How do eProfessionals collaborate with each other?
What are the main factors affecting an effective and efficient
collaboration?
How to evaluate the impact of collaboration tools?
How to evaluate the impact of collaborative environments?
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Collaboration: A Paradox?
There is a need to have a proper amount of diversity to ensure a higher
creativity and innovation potential
while having more partners with different processes, disciplines,
cultures, and languages implies more factors impacting negatively
collaboration effectiveness and efficiency, such as:
1. Collaborative Distance factors
2. Conceptual ambiguity affecting communication and common
understanding among collaborating individuals
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Collaboration Trends [Morello & Burton, 2006]
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Tool Usage [Davenport, 2005]
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Media Naturalness
“The media naturalness hypothesis argues that, other things being
equal, a decrease in the degree of naturalness of a communication
medium (or its degree of similarity to the face-to-face medium) leads
to the following effects in connection with a communication
interaction:
1. increased cognitive effort,
2. increased communication ambiguity, and
3. decreased physiological arousal.“
[Kock 2005]
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Synchronous/Asynchronous
What’s the weight of synchronous interactions compared to
asynchronous interactions?
Media Naturalness is about
Synchronous Interaction: ?% working time
Not concerned by Media Naturalness is about
Asynchronous Interactions: ?% working time
What are the advantages and disadvantages of not being physically
collocated?
Application sharing, white boarding, annotation and mark-up
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Collaborative Distance
Innovation
KM (CoP, CoI)
CSCW
What Do we know about factors affecting collaboration?
Collaborative
Distance
NPD (New Product Development)
Several hundreds of papers have been identified which are more or less related to CD
© ECOSPACE Project
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Proximity Map
Knoben & Oerlemans 2006
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Gaps?
Conceptual ambiguity on CD factors
Lack of holistic views on CD factors
CD factors Inter-relationships
Role of collaboration tools on CD factors
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Collaborative Distances
There are many factors affecting an effective and efficient collaboration
in creating different types of distance
These factors are either objective or subjective and could be grouped
into different types of collaborative distance
These different types of collaborative distance are related to several
dimensions such as structural, social, technical and legal dimensions
There are elements bridging collaborative distances
There are elements compressing collaborative distances
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Collaborative Distance Map
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A Theoretical Model
Arena = interpersonal space
mutual understanding
Control interpersonal
productivity
Larger the arena becomes, the
more rewarding, effective, and
productive the relationship is apt to
be.
Luft & Ingham 1969
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M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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A Conceptual Model
Collaboration
Technologies
Collaborative distance
……..
© ECOSPACE Project
Individual contributions
Common or shared
understanding
Collaborative
space
New concepts
Document/Joint Bid
versions
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
Contributions
Outcomes
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Research Approach
Data Triangulation
Electronic
Surveys
+
Interviews
Qualitative
Quantitative
Action Research
• A participative and qualitative
method through an iterative
spiral process involving endusers.
• To converge progressively
towards the most appropriate
software tool or technology
and understanding of what is
happening.
Platform log files
Quantitative
© ECOSPACE Project
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New Collaboration Scenarios
Ideagora
Wikinomic
Stigmergic
Symbiotic
WebErgence
© ECOSPACE Project
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Webergence 1
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.
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Webergence 2
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]
© ECOSPACE Project
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Self Organisation
Self-organization is a process in which the internal organization of a system,
normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or
managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically often
display emergent properties.
An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple
entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a
collective. Merely having a large number of interactions is not enough by itself to
guarantee emergent behaviour;
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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From Team Collaboration to Mass Collaboration
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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ECOSPACE Concepts
Group/Project =
email list,
file server,
access rights
Independent
Cooperation
Applications
Independence of
cooperation
content/objects
and applications
Presence and
Action Awareness
flexibility vs.
prescription
semantic modelling
of group, structure,
relationships
User Centric
Interoperability,
semantically empowered
infrastructure
Active Metadata,
RFID utilization,
‘intelligent’ content
Work context
and rhythm analysis
user-defined
task flow, activity
planning
Group life cycle
management.
Activity Oriented
Integration
Ad hoc CWE
creation
Cooperation Aware
Applications
Collaboration aware
content/objects,
embedded services,
physical/electronic
mapping
Collaboration
awareness,
collaboration activity
monitoring,
coop.-visualisations
people/task-centric
vs.
document/process
centric
applications
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Bringing People and Concepts together
Towards new collaboration
approaches (e.g. Mass
Collaboration)
Concepts
(Technical
networking)
Topic maps
People-Concepts
Concept maps
maps
Cognition
People
individual
communities
many
0
© ECOSPACE Project
maps
People
1
individual
communities
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
many
(Social
networking)
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People-Concept Networking (PCN)
Cognitive theories
Woo
Hypermedia Learning
Eklund
Multimedia Learning
Jonassen
Hypertext Learning
© ECOSPACE Project
Sopher
Conceptual structure
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Expected Benefits
Connecting people and concepts together
Systematic identification of potential collaboration opportunities &
resources
Discovery of emerging concepts
Enabling instant learning
Enabling a faster way to reach common understanding
Facilitating group consciousness
Enabling Knowledge Connection
Evaluate diversity within groups or communities
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Expectation Awareness
● Expectation icon is a link to an expectation list
● Color is an indication for expectation status
– Yellow: pending expectations
– Green: fulfilled expectations
– Red: not fulfilled expectations
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Collaboration Awareness
● Turning individuals into group consciousness
– Most of the tools have been designed for individual work
– Most of the individuals are communicating with co-workers to exchange
information relevant to the completion of their tasks (e.g. telephone, fax, emails)
– Few individuals are using CSCW tools (web based) to share information within a
small group, often a project team (e.g. shared workspace, web conf)
● Collaboration awareness to bridge collaborative distances
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Presence Awareness (online, not available, away, busy, on travel)
Activity Awareness (e.g. who’s doing what)
Event Awareness (e.g. physical or virtual meetings, workshops, conferences)
Production Awareness (e.g. new documents, blog entries, wiki pages)
Expectation Awareness (e.g. document to be read, completed, reviewed)
Context Awareness (e.g. working environment: location, project, community)
Profile Awareness (e.g. individual’s profile web page)
Concept Awareness (e.g. tags, wikipedia)
Knowledge Awareness (Knowledge Discovery (explicit), Knowledge Connection
(tacit))
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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Collaboration Awareness
Mr. Appelt is working
on multiple topics
These most important
phrases are extracted
from documents Mr.
Appelt is interested in
Mr. Appelt has common
interests with Prinz, Seeling,
Marcpallot, Hloen, and others
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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An initial architecture
ECOSPACE
Native Desktop
Application
W
E
B
2.
0
New Ecospace
Application
PlugIn
Activity with Semntic Information
Activity with Semantic Information
CoCoS
CoCoS
Activity with Semantic Information
CoCoS
…
Micro-task
Basic services
Presence
Shared Workspace
Blog
S
O
A
...
BSCW
© ECOSPACE Project
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Composite Cooperation Services (CoCoS)
What are the daily activities that we perform using cooperation
applications?
How can we describe / visualise these?
What are the interface between these applications
Where do we see a lack of interoperability?
How much meta information is lost between the applications?
What are the consequences of this for the user/group performance?
© ECOSPACE Project
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2009: ECOSPACE Impact
A view of tomorrow: a single collaboration environment
● eProfessional working mode is becoming
a norm
● Architecture and protocol to support
interoperability among tools
● Collaboration awareness
● Group lifecycle management
● People centric visualization
● Sharing services
● Contextual environment
● Ambient intelligence/ RFID
● Physual designing / embedded support
for asymmetrical collaborative situations
● Knowledge connection (people concepts
networking)
© ECOSPACE Project
M. Pallot, ESoCE-NET & W. Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT
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You are invited to join the CWE Developers‘ Forum!
● Contribute to the Collaborative Distance Research Framework
● Participate in the reference architecture discussion and development
● Use our basic services
● Adapt your developments to this initiative
● Contribute to the development of Composite Collaboration Services
● Use our environment as an eProfessional Community
Contacts:
wolfgang.prinz@fit.fraunhofer.de
Marc.pallot@esoce.net
© ECOSPACE Project
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