An Advanced Collaborative Platform for Professional Virtual Communities

The goal of this paper is to introduce and describe the needs of building a supporting platform (the Advanced Collaborative Platform) for Professional Virtual Communities (PVC) inside the ECOLEAD project. The activities covered by this paper mainly consisted in defining the identified user functionalities, arranged accordingly the main life-cycle phases (PVC operations, Virtual Team Creation, and Virtual Team operations); in defining the reference architecture and the development environment of the platform for deploying PVC portals; in identifying the peculiar and specific functionalities to the PVC paradigm (referred to as “hot” functionalities).