Virtual Organization

The increasing mobility due to Bologna process forces the academic partners to increase the inter-operability of their administrative processes, by interacting through a collaborative networks and therefore acting as an academic virtual organization. To facilitate the communication and the comprehension of the administrative processes between the components of the CN, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is proposed in this paper as a standard graphical model for administrative processes and transactions. The adaptability of this standard for academic processes and the difficulties of “translating” the actual administrative models (legal texts) in BPMN diagrams are analyzed.

Abstract-This paper reviews some key structural and design dimensions of organizations and how they apply to electronic business and the virtual organization. The paper reviews the relevant literature on design of electronic commerce organizations. Although few studies have ...

Purpose – The importance of virtual brand communities is growing day by day as a result of consumers increasingly using online tools to contact fellow consumers in order to get information on which to base their decisions. For this reason, this work aims to explore some of the effects of ...

This dissertation describes and analyzes six themes that emerged during the first three years' development of Catalytic Communities, a community development organization meant to operate strictly in cyberspace, thus reaching a global audience, though legally based in the US and Brazil. I founded this organization with minimal experience and, through this dissertation, describe my learning during its pilot and maturation phase, as an idea was transformed into a viable organization, from September 2000 through December 2003.

My basic question was: what can be learned about a new type of civil society institution - the Dot Org - during its early years? The six themes that naturally surfaced, and which I then explore, fall into three broad categories: (1) those that explain its creation (the history of technology, the Brazilian reality, social network theory); (2) those that help describe what the organization came to look like (the concept of the Dot Org, the effect of the development of a physical space on the virtual organization); and (3) those that describe the management processes used to keep and develop such an organization (staff management and fundraising lessons).

Rather than attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of Catalytic Communities, I describe the results of a learning process, providing more qualitative and deep knowledge that only the protagonist in an academic function can provide. This dissertation is therefore a study of "learning by doing," for which the lessons learned are not only those referring to the six themes that surface but also those that help define a new research approach that I call Protagonist Action Research (PrAR).

Dissertation Supervisor: Seymour Mandelbaum
Title: Professor of City and Regional Planning
University of Pennsylvania

Awards:
2005 Winner of the Gill-Chin Lim Award for the Best Dissertation on International Planning.
2004 Nominee for the Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for the Best Dissertation in Planning.

Social Network analysis focuses on patterns of relations between and among people, organizations, states, etc. It aims to describe networks of relations as fully as possible, identify prominent patterns in such networks, trace the flow of information through them, and discover what effects these relations and networks have on people and organizations. Social network analysis offers a very promising potential for analyzing human-human interactions in online communities (discussion boards, newsgroups, virtual organizations). This Tutorial provides an overview of this analytic technique and demonstrates how it can be used in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research and practice, focusing especially on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). This topic acquires particular importance these days, with the increasing popularity of social networking websites (e.g., youtube, myspace, MMORPGs etc.) and the research interest in studying them.

We report preliminary results from a socio-technical analysis of scientific collaboration, specifically a loosely connected group of physical anthropology researchers. Working from a combination of interview data and artifact analysis, we identify current barriers to the scientists' collaboration as it relates to a valuable but scarce resource, a high-resolution computer tomography scanner. We analyze a two-layer structure of the collaboration,

The quality of care practice is difficult to judge. Indeed, support and care provision is very personal, i.e., assessments are individual and lead to specific care packages, involving social services, health workers, care agencies. We expect privacy in our own affairs and confidentially from those to whom we disclose them. Therefore, we are in an urgent need for new, technological and formal approaches to problem solving, as the increase of population with special care requirements. Following this line of thought, it is one’s goal to present the VirtualECare framework, an intelligent multi-agent system able to monitor, interact and serve its customers, which are in need of care services, based in open standards, expecting not only to fulfil the objectives referred to above, but also to overcome the problems induced by the use of new technologies and formalisms.

Many music students today experience difficulties in composing melodies without a prior harmonical
guide. While harmony can be helpful in creating a melody the generation of harmony is challenging due
to the many factors that must be taken into account, such as style, harmonic functions, musical consonance
or aesthetics. Although various solutions have been proposed in the past, our study employs
a different expert solution based on virtual organizations to make musical harmonies, which can assist
novice improvisers and/or composers. The virtual organizations are implemented with Multi-Agent System
(MAS) using PANGEA (Platform for Automatic coNstruction of orGanizations of intElligent Agents),
a platform to develop different multiagent systems. The main goal is to simulate an expert multiagent
system that can compose harmony following specific rules. To do so, the Harmony Search Algorithm is
implemented as the main behavior of the composer agent, and adapted to a Belief-Desire-Intention architecture.
The application of a VO has not been previously used in the development of this kind of expert
system in music. We measured the quality of the music obtained, by minimizing a mathematical function.
Additionally, we developed an evaluation test that positively validates the musical results from the
perspective of consonance and usefulness of the composers.

This paper presents a set of guidelines in terms of business process for VO Breeding Environments (VBEs) and Virtual Organizations (VOs) management based-on ECOLEAD Project Results. A detail description of an Integral Business Process Management (I-BPM) Framework, using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is presented. The I-BPM framework describes a set of process models that depict what happens during each VBE and VO management processes, taking the point of view of an external observer, to provide rationale of activities that should be carried out by a set of VBE actors to achieve the expected business process results.

Collaboration is essential to develop successful Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNOs). In order to know if an organization is ready and has the needed characteristics for collaborate and participate in a CNO, either a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) or a Virtual Organization (VO), a set of specific elements should be evaluated. These evaluation elements are referred as Readiness for Collaboration Assessments and are the main topic of this paper. Main elements that should be considered in these assessments, especially for an organization that wants to become a VBE member are presented as a first approach that can be implemented in different Virtual Breeding Environments.

We briefly describe the authorization requirements, focusing on the framework of the DataGrid and DataTAG Projects and illustrate the architecture of a new service we have developed, the Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS), to manage authorization information in Virtual Organization scope.

Forming virtual organizations (VOs) is a new workplace strategy that is also needed to prepare information, technology, and knowledge workers for functioning well in inter-organizational teams. University information studies programs can simulate VOs in courses and teach certain skill sets that are needed in VO work: critical thinking, analytical methods, ethical problem solving, stakeholder analysis, and writing policy are among the needed skills and abilities. Simulated virtual teams allow participants to learn to trust team members and to understand how communication and product development can work effectively in a virtual workspace. It is hoped that some of these methods could be employed in corporate training programs also.In an innovative course, inter-university VOs were created to develop information products. Groups in four geographically dispersed universities cooperated in the project; at its conclusion, students answered a self-administered survey about their experience. Each team’s success or difficulties were apparently closely related to issues of trust in the team process. Access to and ease of communication tools also played a role in the participants’ perceptions of the learning experience and teamwork.

Successful realization of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) vision of a broadly applicable and adopted framework for distributed system integration requires definition of a wide variety of Grid use case scenarios of both e-science and e-business applications. Use cases described in this document cover commercial infrastructure and application topics (Commercial Data Center, Online Media and Entertainment, Inter grid), scientific