Tailoring Cooperation Support through Mediators

Abstract

Cooperative processes are strongly influenced by their context. Individual and group experience, work practices, and the organisational setting are variable factors that help shape a cooperative work context. In an electronic environment the variability and dynamic nature of cooperative processes has to be taken into account. This suggests a requirement for configurability of basic cooperative functionality. In this paper, a concept for the development of a generic CSCW platform is proposed, which offers the possibility to configure its basic cooperation support functionality. Mediating objects are the key feature which enables the tailorability of functionality to the cooperative setting at run-time.