The Design and Development of Internet-and Intranet-Based Collaboratories

In today's interdependent world, applications supporting collaborative interactions are critical for individuals, groups and organizations alike. Most groupware applications are based on proprietary standards, necessitating vendor-specific tools and making it difficult for ad hoc collaboration. This calls for a shift of technology platforms for collaborative systems ("Collaboratories ") from proprietary to open environments based on the Internet and Intranets. We enumerate and analyze Collaboratory requirements for three geographically dispersed electronic communities: individuals with overlapping interests but without formal ties, special interest groups, and organizations with interdependent workgroups. The requirements analysis is based on the premise of maximizing the net value derived by Collaboratory users, and identifies sets of infrastructure and user community specific characteristics. We show to support these requirements, there needs to be an integration of Internet applica...