Framework for Sustaining Collaboration in Laboratory-Oriented Communities of Practice

This paper presents a Web-based collaboration framework designed for sustaining laboratory-oriented activities carried out within academic communities of practice. This framework relies on a Web-based collaboration environment designed as an electronic notebook; such journaling resources being commonly used in laboratory activities for collecting data and thoughts, keeping analyses and notes, as well as sharing information and results. Many electronic notebook systems exist. They are however mostly domain-oriented, such as the ejournal environment developed at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) to support collaborative experimentation in engineering education or the Collaboratories supporting experimental research in specific natural science areas. The new version of the ejournal introduced in this paper, namely the CoPs ejournal, aims at overcoming this limitation by focusing more on the context and the community. The CoPs ejournal has been developed jointly by the EPFL and the HE-Arc Ingenierie (School of engineering, University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland). The original environment has been designed to sustain collaboration in domains characterized by predefined roles (guests, students, assistants, and educators), predefined types of shared assets (measurement data, equipment settings, experimentation protocols or analysis scripts) and predefined privileges and services. The CoPs ejournal is designed to let the users adapt features, structures and rules according to the tacit and evolving interaction schemes driving their community. This is achieved through the definition of a community protocol. The CoPs ejournal has been entirely developed as a collection of Web services using the .NET Framework. It is currently refined and validated for sustaining laboratory-oriented activities within two academic contexts: engineering education and joint research using scientific laboratory resources.