DiNa Framework and Prototype to Support Collaboration in the Wild

Abstract

Much of the available collaboration support tools focus on sharing of documents and managing projects that require planned activities. These tools fall short in meeting principle of least effort or taking into account of the reality of complex work patterns. We propose DiNa framework and system architecture for a topic centric as opposed to document-centric collaboration system using readily available devices. DiNa aims to complement existing approaches. Our primary goal is to seek answers for how these devices can better support collaboration without overloading the workflow. After a literature review and role-playing exercises, the prototypes we developed demonstrate new interaction techniques for defining topics and address them in collaborators’ own terms. It uses different visualizations of the artefacts and their association with the topics, among which is a scalable timeline interface accessible from different platforms, to make the artefacts collected more meaningful in a given context. In this paper we present our recent prototype as a proof-of-concept and its initial evaluations followed by the lessons learnt from our studies on supporting collaboration in the wild. The evaluation outcome is suggestions for improving DiNa-based systems for effective collaboration.