Ecology in global distributed systems

“Real world” group work occurs in a complex sociotechnical environment: CSCW and distributed systems have a word to say. This environment poses problems such as how to manage the whole system without having a master central element, how to support a diverse and large community of people, how to obtain information about different resources, how different systems can interoperate with unlike functionality, etc. A contribution to deal with this problem is given by means of an explicit resource management function. Scaling up is supported by a federation mechanism. The paper describes a modelling approach for this environment, a computational model and some engineering issues of a prototype system being developed in the framework of the ESPRIT BRA COMIC