The collaboration in creativity processes is charactarized by the fact that there is no continuous and detailled planning of workitems possible. At the beginning, involved persons have only a vague imagination of the working goal and the neccessary working steps to reach this goal. The refinement of the goals and the planning evolves gradually during the course of collaboration. Those are subject to frequent changes, e.g. if a solutions is no longer considered to be realizable or other aspects have to be concerned which have not been considered yet.
One goal of this project part is the conceptualization and realization of a software system which supports informal working processes within the application domain of MarcomE. I.e., supporting and monitoring synchronous and asynchronous work and coordination processes in a tight and loose coupling which are executed by one or more persons.
Existing web-based groupware platforms offer a broad variety of tools which support different kinds of collaboration. However, these tools are detached from the working context and cannot be easily integrated into existing work processes. It is also neglected that distributed teams are organized in non-trivial structures and role assignments which change during the progression of the refinement of the work planning process. For long-dated support of creativity processes in distributed working teams it is necessary to manage and visualize a large number of information, their inter-dependencies and their changes over time. Within this project, a framework for the support of formal and informal working processes will be realized by the use of Open-Source components - if possible.
The basic working task for this are: