Collaboration Flow Management: a New Paradigm for Virtual Team Support

Abstract : Collaboration flow management is a new paradigm for virtual team support which departs from the classical ‘workflow management' and ‘collabo-rative computing' paradigms. The aim is to support the opportunistic flow of collaboration within a distributed project, considered as a living and self-organizing system. Such a flow includes informal and formal, synchronous and asynchronous, task-oriented and project-oriented collaborative sessions. Some of them are elements of model-driven session-based process fragments. The paper defines the paradigm and describes our Java prototype of collaboration flow management system through a realistic scenario.