A Flexible Conceptual Framework for Supporting Collaborative Work

Many practitioners and researcher have stated that the widespread of Computer Support of Collaborative work has not been as successful as hoped. There have been many challenges that have faced managers and team members when conducting collaborative work sessions in the virtual environment. Collaboration Script is considered a relatively a new approach in assisting designing successful collaboration sessions. Collaboration Script is a script that formally defines the flow of activities that are needed during a collaboration session. Yet, researchers have been uncertain regarding the complexity nature of such scripts. The key strength of the proposed framework is in its ability to derive a collaborative scripting language that can describe complex designs and in the same time keeps its simplicity. The resulted scripting language should be similar to software programming scripting languages and in the same time based on profound collaboration techniques. Team leaders and managers with basic programming skills should be able to adopt and use such language in a short time and in the same time not afraid of designing complex team collaboration sessions. The proposed framework is composed of four main layers. The First layer is based on well known collaborative techniques that contain a set of mini-activities which are located in the second layer. The third layer formulates the notation and rules of the proposed scripting language. It encloses the required components and commands that should be used in such script. The forth layer provides the needed support to implement such scripts by providing appropriate set of collaborative and supportive tools.