ECOSPACE Towards an Integrated Collaboration Space for eProfessionals

1. ECOSPACETowards 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

2. ECOSPACE Partners 18 innovation partners from 10 countries: Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, UK Research Industry Living Lab

3. User-Centric Interoperability Activity-Task Integration System-Centric Interoperability Application-Service Integration eProfessionals require more than a multitude of communication channels and applications! ECOSPACE INNOVATION CONCEPT source: Harrison, et. al.; ACM GROUP 2005

4. Achieving a collaboration environment through an integration and interoperability middleware and new collaboration support applications ECOSPACE INTEROPERABILITY ECOSPACE collaborationspace for eProfessionals Activity-basedCollaboration Applications Basic client collaborationservices InteroperabilityBridge Open Collaboration Service Bus Open Collaboration Service Bus Virtual ProjectManagement(e.g. SAP) CollaborationBase Functionality(e.g. Euro-Tax) DocumentManagement(e.g. BSCW) Messaging(e.g. Open Source) DocumentManagement(e.g. BC) WorkflowManagement(e.g. TXT) Virtual Presence(e.g. Jaytown) Conferencing(e.g. Arel) Collaboration Services Group A Collaboration Services Group B

5. Interoperability and semantic integration will lead to an activity based collaboration support Group/Communitylife cycle management seamlesssharing Task managementand monitoring Ambient IntelligentCollaboration Cooperation Awareness Collaboration awareness ad hoccollaboration-service composition Collaboration aware objects virtual presence Semantic Integration activity based collaboration support Service-Integration (SOA, P2P, client-server) Interoperability Cooperation Services Conferencing Shared Workspaces Instant Messaging Presence Content Mgmt

6. 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 maintenanceUser Training • Scale up in users and to other domains: • Labs cover broad spectrum of collaboration scenarios relevant to other domains (e.g. education, health, field maintenance) • Partners already in contact with other users for demon-strations/ exploita-tion (SPS, Aladin Network) Project Mgt Lab Engineering design and execution, also in remote locations Atkins+ BC/FIT Publishing workflow with rich media exchange and sharing MediaLab DeAgostini+ TXT/HP Liaison, virtual team composition and project collaboration in complex domains ProfessionalCommunityLab ESoCE+ FIT

7. Later innovation phase:Evaluation and commercialisation • Early innovation phase:Idea generation Idea diamond(Co-creation driven) ECOSPACE takes a new innovation approach driven by technology co-creation between users and developers COMPARISON OF INNOVATION APPROACHES • Traditional Innovation Approach • Technical functionality perspective • User involvement limited to set examples and their validation • Waterfall development of major releases • ECOSPACE Innovation Approach • Systemic perspective of eProfessional ways of working, business context and technology • User involvement from day 1 through co-creation in Living Labs (EAR) • Fast idea push-pull experimentation cycles based on real-life settings and evolving technology Idea funnel(Selection driven)

8. ECOSPACE Workpackage Structure WP6 – Exploitation & Dissemination WP5 – eProfessionals Living-Lab Innovation & Evaluation (includes Training and Demonstration activities) ComplexProject ManagementLab (Atkins) Professional Community lab (FIT + EsoCE) Media Lab (De Agostini) WP7 - Project Management WP4 – collaboration tools WP3 - Collaboration Middleware & services WP2 – Collaborative Platform Architecture WP1 - eProfessionals Workplace Analysis, (includes innovative concepts and methods)

9. Back to the old Design Office era A view of the past with almost no ICT and collocation of resources • 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

10. Nowadays: eBusiness and Internet era Collaboration from a distance becomes more and more a day-to-day reality • 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

11. Collaborative Web Environments (CWE)

12. Single-Sign Login Common Design Interwiki Links to access BSCW Automatic Update of Wiki Templates Single User Database - Common Profile Drupal BSCW MediaWiki Shared Workspace (BSCW), Wiki (Mediawiki), Blogging (Drupal)

13. CWE • Interoperability • Single logon • Single profile page • Group categories for wiki articles and blog entries • Concept (article) wiki pages

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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?

19. 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: • Collaborative Distance factors • Conceptual ambiguity affecting communication and common understanding among collaborating individuals

20. Collaboration Trends [Morello & Burton, 2006]

21. Tool Usage [Davenport, 2005]

22. 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: • increased cognitive effort, • increased communication ambiguity, and • decreased physiological arousal.“ • [Kock 2005]

23. 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

24. Collaborative Distance KM (CoP, CoI) Innovation 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

25. Proximity Map Knoben & Oerlemans 2006

26. Gaps? • Conceptual ambiguity on CD factors • Lack of holistic views on CD factors • CD factors Inter-relationships • Role of collaboration tools on CD factors

27. 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

28. Collaborative Distance Map

29. 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

30. A Conceptual Model Collaborative distance Individual contributions Collaboration Technologies Common or shared understanding Collaborative space Contributions New concepts …….. Document/Joint Bid versions Outcomes

31. Research Approach Data Triangulation • Action Research • A participative and qualitative method through an iterative spiral process involving end-users. • To converge progressively towards the most appropriate software tool or technology and understanding of what is happening. + Electronic Surveys Quantitative Interviews Qualitative Platform log files Quantitative

32. New Collaboration Scenarios • Ideagora • Wikinomic • Stigmergic • Symbiotic • WebErgence

33. 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.

34. 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]

35. 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;

36. From Team Collaboration to Mass Collaboration

37. Group/Project =email list,file server,access rights Independence ofcooperationcontent/objectsand applications IndependentCooperationApplications Presence andAction Awareness flexibility vs.prescription User CentricInteroperability,semantically empoweredinfrastructure user-definedtask flow, activityplanning semantic modellingof group, structure,relationships Active Metadata,RFID utilization,‘intelligent’ content Work contextand rhythm analysis Collaboration awarecontent/objects,embedded services,physical/electronicmapping Collaborationawareness,collaboration activitymonitoring,coop.-visualisations people/task-centricvs.document/processcentricapplications Group life cyclemanagement. Ad hoc CWEcreation Activity OrientedIntegration Cooperation AwareApplications ECOSPACE Concepts

38. Bringing People and Concepts together Concepts (Technical networking) Towards new collaboration approaches (e.g. Mass Collaboration) many communities individual People (Social networking) 0 individual communities many 1

39. People-Concept Networking (PCN) Cognitive theories Woo Hypermedia Learning Eklund Multimedia Learning Jonassen Sopher Hypertext Learning Conceptual structure

40. 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

41. 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

42. 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))

43. 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

44. An initial architecture Activity with Semantic Information Activity with Semantic Information Activity with Semntic Information PlugIn CoCoS CoCoS CoCoS Native Desktop Application ECOSPACE New Ecospace Application W E B 2. 0 … Micro-task S O A Basic services Presence Shared Workspace Blog ... BSCW

45. 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?

46. 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)

47. 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