Modeling Collaborative Behavior: Foundations for Collaboration Technologies

Can models of collaboration serve as a foundation for development of collaborative technologies in much the same way that engineers use models when developing complex systems? We explore this issue by investigating how eight approaches to understanding or modeling collaboration could be used to improve technologies that support a change management process. Some approaches are ostensive, defining how collaboration should be achieved. These approaches provide ways of documenting, analyzing, simulating, and automating the process. Other approaches are performative, describing actual collaboration behavior. These approaches reveal the variability in collaboration and deviations from the intended process. Technologies could benefit from and facilitate both types of approaches by recording collaborative events for later analysis. We conclude by considering ways that modeling collaboration could contribute to requirements analysis, new collaboration capabilities, adoption, and maximizing benefit from technologies.