Shared Workspace

This book is intended as a small contribution to the debate on the future of the economic and social system.
We believe in an ideal of social and technological progress that is based on the innovative power of companies.
Local companies, rooted in their territory, known, responsible, able to balance social, environmental and economic sustainability.
We reject the distracting pessimism of those who see a grey future subjugated to global and sprawling multinationals, but also of those who uncritically superimpose the concept of “enterprise” on the stereotyped image of seventeenth-century steelworks and consider every entrepreneur as a ruthless and predatory subject.
The reality is very different and is made up of innovative and environmentally friendly business models, and new sustainable companies led by a new social class that perceives itself as a driving force for social change and takes up the traits of craftspeople, artists, professionals and entrepreneurs, hybridizing and adapting them to the times.
These pioneers of a new way of doing business are among us and successfully lead companies and projects based on concepts of community, social inclusion, professional exchange, mutual help, and responsibility towards the community.
How did we come to these conclusions?
By exploring, touching, and traveling to discover innovative projects.
Between 2012 and 2018 we visited over 120 different workspaces, travelling across 20 countries and three continents in search of successful models, inspirations and experiences.
We made traveling the core of our research, adopting an ethnographic approach and using many theoretical tools from visual anthropology and participatory anthropology.
To some places we went only once, to others we went back regularly. At some we stayed half a day, at others for months at a time.
We drew important ideas and reflections from all of them and to all of them we owe a debt of gratitude.
The result of this research is the Multifactory Model, a model of intervention designed to be a guide for all those who want to create, from scratch, a shared workspace based on concepts of collaboration, mutual aid, social innovation, sustainability, and the free flow of knowledge.

Evaluation of collaborative systems is necessary in several situations. However, evaluation is frequently done in an ad-hoc manner or not at all. This paper presents a survey of evaluation methods for groupware systems. The analysis, comparison and classification of these methods will help developers choose the appropriate methods for their situation. Furthermore, the survey allows identification of strengths and weaknesses of existing methods, opening opportunities for research in this area. The proposed comparison criteria represent a framework to evaluate and classify new evaluation methods.

The premise of this work is that, like language, the meanings of written representations are contextual and their affordances are appropriated in sometimes-unexpected ways. This situation presents a dilemma for designers of collaborative learning technologies: there is a need for representational and interactional tools that guide and support learning through cognitive and social activities, but predefined mappings between interface elements

Two complementary tools for the cooperation in a ministerial environment ... Wolfgang Prinz GMD—German National Research Center for Information Technology, Germany wolfgang.prinz@gmd.de ... Anja Syri GMD—German National Research Center for ...

An increasing number of collaborative learning environments is based on shared workspace systems using two-dimensional graph-structured visual representations such as argumentation networks and concept maps. We propose an integrated framework that allows for flexibly ...

Abstract. This paper describes the design of the Swisshouse, a physical/virtual cooperative workspace to foster networking and knowledge exchange among a distributed community of Swiss scientists, with business people, lawyers, doctors and politicians. The physical ...

The development of large software is always done by teams of people working together and struggling to produce quality software within their budget. Each person in these teams generally knows his job and wants to do it, without being bothered by other people. However, when people work towards a common goal they have to exchange data and create dependencies between each other regarding these data. If these people have to follow a process, cooperating and synchronizing with co-workers and trying to reach…

Due to the fact that the group playing a core role in the collaborative applications, it is necessary provide models which allow us to supply a shared workspace in which users perform their tasks using shared resources, to coordinate the interaction among users and between them and the shared resources, to facilitate the user access to the collaborative applications and

Laboratorio dii Ingegneria del '3 b o ft ware Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica UniversiitA della Calabria, 1-87030 Rende(CS) - Italy Email: (g.foirtino, l.nigro}@unical.it ... Abstract This paper proposes a novel approach centered on the muljimedia internetworking to ...

We evaluate the use of BSCW shared workspaces in higher education by a comparison of seven courses in which this environment was used. We identified a number of different functions for which the BSCW environment has been used. Effectiveness for the given task appears to be a prime success factor for using ICT. But an effective tool may fail due