Mass collaboration: a case study [customer support system]

We present an overview of a novel customer support system developed at QUIQ between 1999 and 2003. The application was perhaps the first systematic use of mass collaboration, which builds on the observation that large communities of users can be effectively leveraged to help each other, and to advance the interests of the community as a whole. In recent years, mass collaboration has been proposed for uses such as information integration and even program debugging, and shows much promise. In this paper, we outline the main ideas and technical challenges, and describe the QUIQ architecture. Technically, the main achievements include a novel DB-IR engine; a scalable notification engine for a rich class of user-specified alerts; a powerful access control mechanism with support for roles, dynamic groups, and field-level access control; and techniques for editing navigation hierarchies in dynamic sites.