Transforming collaboration structures into deployable informal processes

Abstract

Traditional workflow and activity-centric coordination offers limited process support to human collaborators when unanticipated situations predominate. Under such circumstances, informal processes focus on provisioning relevant resources for achieving collaboration goals. Resources include interaction mechanisms such as shared artifact, social networks, and publish/subscribe information dissemination as complex situations typically demand the close collaboration among multiple human process participants. Currently, however, there exists a gap between (i) selecting and configuring suitable interaction mechanisms (collaboration level) and (ii) deploying the respective collaboration platforms (IT level). In this paper, we present an approach and techniques for transforming collaboration structures into automatically deployable informal processes. We demonstrate how our tools support the specification of desirable collaboration capabilities subsequently deployed to multiple MediaWiki instances.