Adaptable shared workspace to support multiple collaboration paradigms

Abstract

Several recent collaborative systems provide a room-based metaphor to represent shared workspaces that require use of multiple collaborative tools. These systems provide users with a fairly static usage paradigm of room-centered collaboration, requiring users to mold their collaborative activities to the paradigm rather than molding the paradigm to fit the requirements of their collaborative activities. In this paper, we propose a powerful and yet simple event-action based model, augmented with multi-user features, for room-based systems for providing a high degree of adaptability so that these systems can be adapted to provide support for a variety of collaborative facilities, such as call centers, transient rooms, paper reviewing rooms, and role-based collaboration, including facilities that are not necessarily anticipated by system designers. The model can be used by both system developers as well as by system administrators to customize a system to meet the requirements of their group tasks.