Collaborative working environment
 | It has been suggested that Collaborative working system be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since December 2009. |
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:
- Instant messaging
- Application sharing
- Videoconferencing
- Collaborative workspace and document management
- Task- and workflow-management
- Wiki group or community effort to edit wiki pages (e.g. wiki pages describing concepts to enable a common understanding within a group or community)
- Blogging where entries are categorised by groups or communities or other concepts supporting collaboration
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
- ^ Collaboration@Work Experts Group, May 2004, Towards a middleware for collaborative work environments
- ^ Hans Schaffers, Torsten Brodt, Marc Pallot, Wolfgang Prinz (editors), March 2006, The Future Workspace
- ^ Prinz, W.; Loh, H.; Pallot, M.; Schaffers, H.; Skarmeta, A.; Decker, S. ECOSPACE: Towards an Integrated Collaboration Space for eProfessionals
- ^ M.A. Martinez Carreras, A.F. Gomez Skarmeta,2006, Towards Interoperability in Collaborative Environments
- ^ Collaboration@Work Experts Group, February 2006, New Collaborative Working Environments 2020
- ^ J. Lipnack and J. Stamps, 1997, "Virtual Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time, and Organizations with Technology", Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-16553-0
- ^ Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams,December 2006, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
- ^ Kapor presentation, UC Berkeley, 2005-11-09.