Collaborative Software - Collaborative Software and Human Interaction

Collaborative Software and Human Interaction

The design intent of collaborative software (groupware) is to transform the way documents and rich media are shared in order to enable more effective team collaboration.

Collaboration, with respect to information technology, seems to have several definitions. Some are defensible but others are so broad they lose any meaningful application. Understanding the differences in human interactions is necessary to ensure the appropriate technologies are employed to meet interaction needs.

There are three primary ways in which humans interact: conversations, transactions, and collaborations.

Conversational interaction is an exchange of information between two or more participants where the primary purpose of the interaction is discovery or relationship building. There is no central entity around which the interaction revolves but is a free exchange of information with no defined constraints. Communication technology such as telephones, instant messaging, and e-mail are generally sufficient for conversational interactions.

Transactional interaction involves the exchange of transaction entities where a major function of the transaction entity is to alter the relationship between participants. The transaction entity is in a relatively stable form and constrains or defines the new relationship. One participant exchanges money for goods and becomes a customer. Transactional interactions are most effectively handled by transactional systems that manage state and commit records for persistent storage.

In collaborative interactions the main function of the participants' relationship is to alter a collaboration entity (i.e., the converse of transactional). The collaboration entity is in a relatively unstable form. Examples include the development of an idea, the creation of a design, the achievement of a shared goal. Therefore, real collaboration technologies deliver the functionality for many participants to augment a common deliverable. Record or document management, threaded discussions, audit history, and other mechanisms designed to capture the efforts of many into a managed content environment are typical of collaboration technologies.

Collaboration in Education- two or more co-equal individuals voluntarily bring their knowledge and experiences together by interacting toward a common goal in the best interest of students' needs for the betterment of their educational success.

Collaboration requires individuals working together in a coordinated fashion, towards a common goal. Accomplishing the goal is the primary purpose for bringing the team together. Collaborative software helps facilitate the action-oriented team working together over geographic distances by providing tools that help communication, collaboration and the process of problem solving by providing the team with a common means for communicating ideas and brainstorming. Additionally, collaborative software may support project management functions, such as task assignments, time-management with deadlines and shared calendars. The artifacts, the tangible evidence of the problem solving process, including the final outcome of the collaborative effort, typically require documentation and archiving of the process itself, and may involve archiving project plans, deadlines and deliverables.

Collaborative software should support the individuals that make up the team and the interactions between them during the group decision making process. Many of today's teams are composed of members from around the globe, with some members using their second or third language in communicating with the group. This situation provides cultural as well as linguistic challenges for any software that supports the collaborative effort. The software may also support team membership, roles and responsibilities. Additionally, collaborative support systems may offer the ability to support ancillary systems, such as budgets and physical resources.

Brainstorming is considered to be a tenet of collaboration, with the rapid exchange of ideas facilitating the group decision making process. Collaborative software provides areas that support multi-user editing, such as virtual whiteboards and chat or other forms of communication. Better solutions record the process and provide revision history. An emerging category of computer software, a collaboration platform is a unified electronic platform that supports synchronous and asynchronous communication through a variety of devices and channels.

An extension of groupware is collaborative media, software that allows several concurrent users to create and manage information in a website. Collaborative media models include wiki (Comparison of wiki software) and Slashdot models. Some sites with publicly accessible content based on collaborative software are: WikiWikiWeb, Wikipedia and Everything2. By method used we can divide them into:

• Web-based collaborative tools
• Software collaborative tools

Along with these, already traditional, methods recent expansion of corporate use of Second Life and other virtual worlds led to development of a newer generation of software that takes advantage of a 3D data presentation. Some of this software (3D Topicscape) works independently from virtual worlds and simply uses 3D to support user "in concept creation, planning, organization, development and actualization". Other designed specifically to assist in collaboration when using virtual worlds as a business platform, while yet another type of software, Collaborative Knowledge Management (cKM), bridges the gap and can be used simultaneously in Second Life and on the web.

By area served we can divide collaborative software into:

• Knowledge management tools
• Knowledge creation tools
• Information sharing tools
• Collaborative project management tools