Epistemological View of Collaboration Ramana Reddy West Virginia University

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Epistemological View of CollaborationRamana
ReddyWest Virginia University
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Outline

• Part 1
• Concepts of Collaboration
• Barriers to collaboration
• Part 2
• Collaboration An Information Perspective
• Part 3
• Conclusion

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Nature of Collaboration

• Collaboration is innate and key to the survival
  of a society
• In various social structures we notice natural
  collaboration at different levels
• Collaboration brings about complementarity

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Coordination

• Coordination
• The key to success of Collaboration

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Collaboration in Action
House Building in 32634
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How did they do it?

• Coordination built into both product and process
  design
• But, this is not necessarily generalizable to
  diverse ad-hoc collaboration

But Why?
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Natural Inhibitor

• Humans are naturally individualistic.
• They excel in environment, work patterns and
  communication that are attuned to their
  individual inclinations

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Individual Centricity V. Enterprise Centricity
Enterprise Centric
Individual Centric
IT
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• Can we afford not to collaborate?

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Collaboration Failures

• Can you think of any?

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity Barrier

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Complexity Barrier

• There was once a one legged
• dragon called Hui. How on
• earth do you manage those
• legs? he asked a centipede.
• I can hardly manage one!
• Matter of fact, said the
• centipede, I do not manage
• my legs.
• Story by ?? (Chuang Tzu)

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• ??????????????,???
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• ??????,????????
• ?????????

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Complexity Barrier

• Who manages centipedes legs?
• An invisible, indescribable force seems to
  manage the complexity of the centipede.

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Complexity Barrier

• a collaborative enterprise is an organism with
  a myriad of management needs
• An analogous invisible force is needed to
  manage its complexity
• This enables the constituent members to focus on
  the tasks at hand rather than the management of
  complexity

Image source Information Exchange Area of the
Institute for Enterprise Architecture
Development http//www.enterprise-architecture.inf
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Complexity Barrier

• Mechanisms are required to clearly specify and
  execute collaboration
• Specification enables one to capture operational
  rules, constituent members, goals and
  contingencies
• Execution enacts collaboration
• Collaboration progresses until the designated
  goals have been achieved or the time has run out

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity Barrier
• Perception Barrier

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Perception Barrier
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Perception Barrier

• Humans are creatures of habits hence they are
  more productive while working in a familiar
  surrounding
• For instance, users customize their desktops or
  workshops to best suit their working habits
• Providing users environments they are accustomed
  to (contextualization) promotes collaboration

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity Barrier
• Perception Barrier
• Change Barrier

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Change Barrier

• Patterns of collaboration morph
• Changes in collaboration patterns are not
  perceived

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Change Barrier

• Issues such as
• access control
• version control
• transitional organizational change
• Standards

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity Barrier
• Perception Barrier
• Change Barrier
• Intentions Barrier

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Intentions Barrier

• The intention of a human deduced from the result
  or from the external cues that are inherent in
  communication and behavior
• Other actors can alter their behavior based on
  this intent
• How can we ascertain the intent of actions when
  computers manage collaboration?

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity
• Perception
• Change
• Intentions
• Autonomy

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Autonomy - Coping with Mixed Initiative

• The collaborative enterprise, in-essence, is an
  entity with series of events, both expected and
  unexpected
• Events originate as a reaction to
• Other events
• State changes
• While reacting according to state changes is
  necessary, the initiation of the reaction events
  can be carried out by the system or collaborating
  members
• A major issue then is Where does the boundary
  lie between the system and its members?

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Autonomy Barrier

• mixed initiative

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity
• Perception
• Change
• Intentions
• Autonomy
• Goal Disambiguation

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Goal Disambiguation - Plausibility vs.
Possibility

• To get there, we need to define there. a
• common cliché

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity
• Perception
• Change
• Intentions
• Autonomy
• Goal Disambiguation
• Temporal

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Temporal Barrier

• Look-Ahead and look-back simulations to cope
  with the Temporal Barrier

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity
• Perception
• Change
• Intentions
• Autonomy
• Goal Disambiguation
• Temporal
• Measurement Recognition

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Measurement Barrier

• In a group people do what gets measured

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Barriers to Successful Collaboration

• Complexity
• Perception
• Change
• Intentions
• Autonomy
• Goal Disambiguation
• Temporal
• Measurement
• Metrics

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Metrics Barrier

• How do we know how close we are to the goal?
• How do we know how conducive is the environment
  for collaboration?

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Part 2

• Collaboration Information Perspective

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Addressing Barriers to Collaboration

• Tool Centricity V. Information Centricity

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CE Phone (1992)

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CE Phone
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The EkSarva framework

• EkSarva A Workflow-Centric Context-Aware
• Collaboration Framework

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Eksarva

• Provides the necessary building blocks
• facilitating a unified, modular and intuitive
  approach to collaborative application
  instantiation

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The three pillars of EkSarva

• Enterprise Model PPP/SST
• Workflow Model IC3
• Intelligence Model Context Awareness

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EkSarva A Complete View
Conceptual View
Implementation
PPP/SST
Collaborative Enterprise
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Enterprise Model PPP/SST

• Project (P) A project is a specification of the
  collaboration goal and the terminal point of the
  collaboration.
• Person (Agent) (P) Person is an individual group
  member engaged in a collaboration instance.
• Place (P) A place is a concept of a virtual
  meeting place, analogous to a physical meeting
  room, where groups of people come together to
  engage in a task.

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PPP/SST (Contd)

• Signal (S) Signaling is a key mechanism in
  EkSarva.
• Situations (S) generate signals to indicate their
  status in which case the framework proceeds with
  newer tasks and situations
• Smart Transcript (T) Smart Transcript is an
  object that links all the situations that are
  part of the collaboration episodes. We could
  imagine the transcript as being the memory of
  the collaboration instance

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Workflow Model IC3

• The IC3 is a set of metaphor-neutral building
  blocks
• Information
• Communication
• Coordination
• Computation

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IC3

• IC3 distills the CE Phone concept as follows
• Information
• Information about the collaborative effort (
  goals, tasks, timeline etc) as well as artifacts
  created as a result of collaboration
• Communication
• Synchronous and Asynchronous

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IC3

• Coordination
• The actions taken to ensure that the tasks are
  performed at the right time, by the appropriate
  people, taking into account all the constraints
  such as dependencies, resource restrictions etc.
• Computation
• All the necessary computational processes
  required to accomplish the tasks

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IC3
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EkSarva Architecture

• The architecture consists of two major
  subsystems
• Specification subsystem
• Instantiation Subsystem

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Specification Subsystem

• Specification subsystem is responsible for
  providing mechanisms to specify the framework
  components
• Project, Person, Place, Situation, Signal and
• Smart Transcript

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Instantiation Subsystem

• This subsystem is responsible for instantiating
  the collaboration defined in the previous
  subsystem. The collaboration engine is
  responsible for activating the collaboration
  environment.

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EkSarva Specification and Execution
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EkSarva A Layered View
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Interface Layer

• The interface, in addition to, providing a
  representational view of the underlying
  collaboration Project also enables interaction
  with the project.

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Coordination Layer

• The coordination layer is the command center of a
  collaboration project
• Various framework components that were
  illustrated in the previous section are realized
  in this layer through the following services
• Workspace Manager
• Situation Manager
• Agenda Manager
• Context Manager
• Transcript Manager

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Knowledge Layer

• This layer contains the library of concepts that
  enables EkSarva to bring context awareness and
  intelligence to the collaboration process

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Network Layer

• This layer represents the network infrastructure
• It enables the communication and data transfer
• Activities in this layer are triggered by the
  combination of signals, generated by the above
  layers, and awareness to perform an activity

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(No Transcript)
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EkSarva A Complete View
PPP/SST
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Collaboration in the Software Development
Lifecycle
Morphing Collaboration patterns
Requirements Analysis
Design
Implementation
Testing Debugging
Local informal meetings
Peer-to-peer interaction, brainstorming
discussions, oppurtunistic collaboration
Shorter synchronization Longer individual
parallel execution
Formal Scheduled Meetings
Only Documents are exchanged.
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Personal Space Project Group Space
Project 1 Workspace
Personal Space
Software Engg. View
Project Manager
Developer
Collaboration includes Peer-to-Peer interaction
(Mixed Initiative)
Technical Writer
Software Engineer
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Project Workflow
Project Group Space
Project Personal Space
Drags and drops code files
1.Agent receives code files. 2. Checks if all
files are present for integration
Developer 1 Coding
If all present indicate ready for integration.
Project Personal Space
Developer 2 Coding
Project Personal Space
Drags and drops code files
Developer 3 Integration
Notify if files missing !
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Workflow Centricity Context Awareness !!
Project Group Space
Project Personal Space
Developer 1 Coding
Project Personal Space
Developer 2 Coding
Project Personal Space
Developer 3 Integration
Communication (C)

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• EkSarva Strategy for Mitigating the Barriers

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Managing Complexity

• Workflow management systems Focusing on the
  dynamic nature of workflow.
• Dynamic workflow enables intuitive and automatic
  modification of goals, tasks and members and
  handle contingencies

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Perception

• We are exploring the use of context-aware
  information in combination with visualization
  agents and immersion through virtual environments
  to identify and capture user preferences, system
  resources and capabilities and provide views
  accordingly

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Change

• We are exploring patterns of collaboration to
  facilitate the smooth transition of collaborative
  paradigms

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Intentions, Autonomy, Goal Disambiguation

• Through the PPP/SST modeling we believe the
  collaboration framework could facilitate the
  management of human-agent continuum.
• Introspection Strategies

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Temporal, Measurement, Metrics

• We are exploring the use of a machine
  understandable Smart Transcript and discrete
  event simulations to explore look-ahead and look
  back of events and Real time operational
  intelligent feedbacks

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Our Thesis

• PPP/SST IC3 Intelligence Model
• Successful Collaboration !!

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Team EkSarva
Thank You!