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Malone and Crowston's Taxonomy

Malone and Crowston [ Malone Crowston ] define a taxonomy based on the following theory or model of coordination/collaboration. According this model collaboration/coordination occurs among actors, having interdependencies among them, doing activities to meet goals. This defines four components of collaboration/coordination:

identifying goals

mapping goals to activities

selecting actors to perform activities, and

selecting actors to perform activities, and

``managing'' interdependencies among activities/actors, which can be further broken into managing resource allocation, sequencing and synchronizing, managing physical interdependencies between objects, avoiding duplicates, and managing other interdependencies.

These phases of collaboration are carried out by processes arranged in a hierarchy, where a higher-level process depends on a lower-layer process to do its task. Four levels of processes are defined:

coordination/collaboration-- goal decomposition, task assignment, resource allocation, synchronizing, sequencing;

group decision making-- proposing and evaluating alternatives;

communication among the collaborators-- transporting and routing messages;

perception of common objects-- seeing and manipulating shared information.

We can now classify the applications by which components of this model they support.

Level 1, Coordination:
Goal decomposition: An example is a system called Polymer, [ Croft Lefkowitz ] which not only helps in decomposition of goals into tasks, but also sequencing of these tasks.
Task assignment (agreeing on commitments): Coordinator.
Resource allocation (task prioritization): Information Lens (Filters).
Synchronization: meeting scheduling tools such as RTCAL.
Sequencing: Polymer.

Level 2, Group Decision Making:
Proposing Alternatives: gIBIS, RTCAL, Cognoter.
Evaluating Alternatives: gIBIS.

Level 3, Communication:
Transporting messages: electronic mail.
Routing: ActionWorkflow.

Level 4, Perception of common objects: Quilt, PREP, Grove, and the rest of the tools not covered above.


Prasun Dewan
Sun Mar 16 14:19:05 EST 1997