Project awareness system - Improving collaboration through visibility

Abstract

This paper proposes and describes the Project Awareness System (PAS) which is designed to improve the awareness of projects and project participants within and beyond organizational borders. The aim of this system is to increase the visibility of projects, so that users can easily find interesting ones and contact their participants to increase communication, collaboration and reuse of project results. The system enables an organizational unit to easily store project information at a central place. It does not impose strict rules regarding what data about projects can be stored. In this way strongly heterogeneous project environments can be mapped. The system offers its users extensive search mechanisms to find the projects they are looking for. The PAS additionally supports federation of multiple instances. The user can browse through the projects of multiple organizational units and organizations at one place, while each unit stays in full control of its data. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.