Collaborative working environment

A collaborative working environment (CWE) supports people (e.g., e-professionals) in their individual and cooperative work. Research in CWE involves organisational, technical, and social issues.

The following applications or services are considered elements of a CWE:

Contents

Description

Working practices are evolving from the traditional proximity or geographical collocation paradigm to a virtual collocation paradigm where professionals work together whatever their geographical location. In this context, e-professionals use a collaborative working environment which provides the capabilities to share information[1] and exchange views in order to reach a common understanding. Such a level of common understanding enables an effective and efficient collaboration among different expertises.

The concept of CWE is derived from the concept of virtual workspaces[2][3], and is related to the concept of ework; it extends the traditional concept of the professional to include any type of knowledge worker who intensively uses information and communications technology (ICT) environments and tools[4] in their working practices. Typically a group of eprofessionals conducts their collaborative work through the use of collaborative working environments (CWE)[5].

The CWE concept refers to online collaboration (i.e. virtual teams,[6] mass collaboration,[7] massively distributed collaboration[8]), online communities of practice, such as the open source community, and open innovation principles.

See also

References

  1. ^ Collaboration@Work Experts Group, May 2004, Towards a middleware for collaborative work environments
  2. ^ Hans Schaffers, Torsten Brodt, Marc Pallot, Wolfgang Prinz (editors), March 2006, The Future Workspace
  3. ^ Prinz, W.; Loh, H.; Pallot, M.; Schaffers, H.; Skarmeta, A.; Decker, S. ECOSPACE: Towards an Integrated Collaboration Space for eProfessionals
  4. ^ M.A. Martinez Carreras, A.F. Gomez Skarmeta,2006, Towards Interoperability in Collaborative Environments
  5. ^ Collaboration@Work Experts Group, February 2006, New Collaborative Working Environments 2020
  6. ^ J. Lipnack and J. Stamps, 1997, "Virtual Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time, and Organizations with Technology", Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-16553-0
  7. ^ Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams,December 2006, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
  8. ^ Kapor presentation, UC Berkeley, 2005-11-09.

External links