Exactly a week ago, on Tuesday, April 24th, I took part in a workshop
organized by Ecospace in order to educate CoreLabs people about the AMI@Work Communities tools and discuss further requirements of the system.
We went over the different existing tools:

• The wiki
• The BSCW system
• The blogs

In the wiki, we first discussed the navigation paradigm. As it is today, the navigation bar on the left is a static bar that gives a variety of navigation options in the AMI@Work communities. Having a variety of options is very important, however, too many options may be counter productive. When newcomers to a community (not AMI@Work, but one of the communities in it) receive a direct link to their community (like I originally received a link to the CoreLabs page) they are quite overwhelmed by the amount of options. They want to learn about their own community, but with a single click in the navigation bar they are taken one level up and see bounds of information of all communities. This is very confusing and it seems that a dynamic bar is required. A bar that would put, at its top, the navigation options of the community itself (e.g., to the blog category of the community rather than to the blogs homepage / to the communities BSCW space rather than to the BSCW homepage / and to additional wiki pages of the community that are of interest to the community). Only under these community navigation options, should the user find more general navigation options.

In the process of trying to figure out the existing functionalities of the collaboration platform, and collecting ideas for required functionalities, a few questions come to my mind:

1. Who are the expected users of the collaboration platform?
   
   1. Only LL leaders / operators?
   2. Or everybody?
2. Should there be different networks for personal vs. professional use? (I expect there should)
   

Hello,

My name is Michal Jacovi and I belong to the Collaboration Technologies department in IBM Haifa Research Lab. My academic background is in Computer Science (MSc, 1993), but my personal interest and my professional expertise focus on the human aspects of interaction with technology, and specifically on collaboration through technology. A list of my publications may be found here, and as you can see there, I deal with community-building and diffusion of technologies. In my current role I'm involved in quite a few of the projects of my group, which deal with: presence, social networks, and capturing of experiences.