Gianni Bosio

Managing Context-Dependent Workspace Awareness in an e-Collaboration Environment

Users increasingly manage their home and work collaborations by exploiting online applications. However, they have to deal with a fragmented view of their workspaces, because each application separately handles the awareness support. In order to address this issue, we propose an Integrated Collaboration Environment supporting (i) the synchronization of applications in a shared context, and (ii) a holistic awareness information management. Specifically, we present a notification model supporting a contextual organization of the awareness information, in order to reduce the disruptive effect of notifications on the users attention.

Context-dependent awareness support in open collaboration environments

The widespread adoption of online services for performing work, home and leisure tasks enables users to operate in the ubiquitous environment provided by the Internet by managing a possibly high number of parallel (private and shared) activity contexts. The provision of awareness information is a key factor for keeping users up-to-date with what happens around them; e.g., with the operations performed by their collaborators. However, the delivery of notifications describing the occurred events can interrupt the users’ activities, with a possible disruptive effect on their emotional and attentional states. As a possible solution to the trade-off between informing and interrupting users, we defined two context-dependent notification management policies which support the selection of the notifications to be delivered on the basis of the user’s current activities, at different granularity levels: general collaboration context versus task carried out. These policies are offered by the COntext depeNdent awaReness informAtion Delivery (CONRAD) framework. We tested such policies with users by applying them in a collaboration environment that includes a set of largely used Web 2.0 services. The experiments show that our policies reduce the levels of workload on users while supporting an up-to-the-moment understanding of the interaction with their shared contexts. The present paper presents the CONRAD framework and the techniques underlying the proposed notification policies.

Collaboration Support for Activity Management in a Personal Cloud Environment

This paper describes a framework supporting the development of open collaboration environments which integrate heterogeneous business services. The framework facilitates the user cooperation in the execution of shared activities by offering a workspace awareness support which abstracts from the business services employed to operate. The management of the workspaces of the users collaborations is based on the functions offered by the Collaborative Task Manager CTM, which offers a lightweight and flexible model for handling more or less complex collaborations. The CTM is integrated with business services in a loosely coupled way which supports the management of parallel workspaces for accessing the users collaboration contexts, their objects and the related awareness information.

Collaborative Service Clouds

Thanks to Web 2.0 technologies, many computer-supported activities are provided on-line, which enhances the possibility of sharing information and resources. In particular, the concept of service cloud is emerging as a paradigm for offering Web-based services based on an open distributed architecture. In this paper, the authors propose a framework supporting the management of Collaborative Service Clouds, i.e., open, Web-based environments that enable the integration of heterogeneous services, and provide a user-centered unified management of business and private activities. The management of Collaborative Service Clouds is enabled by an open architecture, which provides services and data synchronization, coupled with a set of core applications supporting essential aspects of the functionality of the environment.

Supporting Collaboration between Customers and Developers: A Framework for Distributed, Agile Software Development

The traditional, in-house software development process is progressively losing its appeal in favor of distributed, multi-site development: this is mainly due to the well-known advantages of the latter, such as higher productivity and lower costs. However, this practice has also some documented disadvantages that are inherent to distance: geographical, temporal and socio-cultural distances between stakeholders can affect communication, coordination and control activities, thus making collaboration very difficult. This would not immediately look as the ideal scenario for applying Agile methodologies, which definitely rely on continuous collaboration between all stakeholders, including (with a very important role) the customers. This paper analyzes issues related to collaboration between customers and developers in a distributed, Agile setting and proposes a framework that defines practices and tools for handling project information and communication activities.

A visualization model supporting an efficient context resumption in collaboration environments

Activity awareness support is a key feature for helping people to resume the state of their collaborations when switching among different tasks. This paper proposes a visualization model supporting an incremental access to information, from an overview of the state of the users activity contexts to the details about the events occurred in each of them. The higher visualization layer is represented as a tag cloud and provides a general view of the degree of activity occurred in each context. The other levels are projections on the event history focused on specific perspectives; e.g., general collaboration, task or actor. A user study showed that our visualization model outperforms standard awareness spaces which provide a direct access to awareness events because it enables users to retrieve the relevant information quicker and more precisely.