Complexity in collaborative online socio-interationist environments: A good reason for distributed systems

Abstract

Despite the technological enhancement IT has had, some main points still have no satisfactory solutions and constitute a research subject for those interested in knowledge management. It does not seem evident that the adoption of either groupware technologies or collaborative environments induces effective collaborative/cooperative behavior in team workers. If some collaborative environment projects are strongly planned they have difficulty to be integrated in the workers' daily habits. We assume that the problem may have two dimensions that shall be considered: a) the commonly accepted cycle of knowledge management is unable to cover the rich and complex cycle of social creation and validation of knowledge; b) a distributed environment architecture seems to be the best candidate to implement a system where the number, the complexity and the evolving characteristics of services that would take into account socio-interactionist dimensions of individuals and groups are necessary to reinforce collaborative behaviors. A Collaborative Online Learning Environment is discussed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.