ECOSPACE/CDF
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"The ECOSPACE vision is to bring together semantic and social web (Web 2.0) through a user-centric interoperability approach towards the collaborative web or web 3.0!"
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[edit] Collaborative Distance Framework
[edit] Objectives
Objectives of the Collaborative Distance (CD) Reference Framework are the following:
- Reach a common or shared understanding about distance and proximity factors affecting collaboration;
- Present and maintain a systematic literature review on distance and proximity in distributed collaboration;
- Introduce appropriate tentative dimensions or categories to disentangle distance and proximity factors;
- List and categorise all factors affecting collaboration within a holistic and systematic approach;
- Formalise and maintain CD related concepts and Framework (CDF) within a CD research and practice community as an open initiative under “Creative Commons”;
- Deduct collaboration barriers and enablers in relation with the CDF;
- Prepare the ground to evaluate the cohesiveness of published findings on CD factors;
- Identify concepts and ICT artefacts enabling to bridge and compress various distance types (overcome the barriers);
- Study relationships between collaborative environments related state-of-the-art technologies & practices and CD factors affecting collaboration;
- Identify potential gaps and research challenges when comparing state-of-the-art technologies and their impact on distance factors;
- Study new collaboration paradigms, concepts, ICT artefacts and scenarios potential impact on distances;
- Explore, experiment and evaluate new innovative collaboration concepts and ICT artefacts within experimental collaborative environments (Living Labs) and collect data on various Collaborative Distance types and related factors affecting collaboration effectiveness and efficiency;
- Prepare a CWE effectiveness map and related metrics according to CD dimensions;
- Make measurements and deduct findings within new research studies conducted in compliance with the CDF.
[edit] Definition
We define the concept of “Collaborative Distance” as being a research area which consists in making observation on distance factors affecting collaboration performance within distributed groups from which is derived a universal framework (CDF). We are not using the concept of collaboration distance as it was previously defined as being the distance between two collaborating individuals that are nodes in a collaboration graph (Odda, 1979; Harary, 1979) also known as being the Erdos number (Batagelj & Mrvar, 2000), distance in between two mathematicians collaborating with Erdos, or Bacon number for two actors collaborating with Bacon. Another example of collaboration distance among individuals experimented during the ECOSPACE project (Prinz et Al, 2006), is to consider all events (i.e. create, read, edit) generated by group members on all content objects uploaded within a shared workspace. The resulting figure is a hyperGraph constituted of individuals, content objects and relationships that are valued to measure the collaboration distance among group members (Pallot et Al, 2006).
Distance is mentioned in the literature as having strong general effects and significant implications on both collaborative work and supporting technologies (Kiesler & Cummings 2002; Olson & Olson 2001). In this context, distance or proximity (Kiesler and Cummings 2001; Knoben and Oerlemans 2006; Oerlemans & al 2000; O’Leary & Cummings 2002; Torre & Rallet 2005; Watson-Manheim et Al 2002) appears in the literature either as the main factor (in this Literature context, “distance” means implicitly “geographical distance”) or as a composite concept grouping factors affecting collaboration performance among organizations or individuals. Distance may also appear as geographically distant collaboration often described as distributed teams or groups (Kiesler & Cummings, 2002; Torre & Rallet 2005) or as physically distant (Watson-Manheim et Al 2002) or even as distant linkages (Oerlemans and al 2000). However, in this case distant collaboration simply means that collaborating individuals are operating from geographically dispersed sites.
Distance is a quite complex concept composed of several dimensions corresponding to diverse “aspects” or “perspectives” such as geographical, organizational and technological dimensions (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006) or geographical, industrial, organizational, temporal, cultural, cognitive, social and institutional dimensions (Hyypiä & Kautonen 2005). To be noticed that having 3 or 8 dimensions, as expressed in the above two examples, may appear quite incredible but in fact it depends on including distance classes or types in the model. Knoben and Oerlemans have identified six non spatial dimensions, one spatial dimension and nine synonymous dimensions during their literature review. After interpreting proximity dimensions for the specific field of IOC they proposed that only organizational, technological and geographical dimensions were relevant in order to reduce the existing conceptual ambiguity. Fischer proposed 4 distance dimensions, namely physical, temporal, technological and conceptual while he was considering different cultures as being a source of diversity and not necessarily as being a cultural distance (Fischer, 2005b). Fischer is also considering distance and diversity factors as being opportunities or sources of social creativity rather than being exclusively collaboration barriers (Fischer, 2004). Bonifacio and Molani argued already about the key role or richness of diversity in the process of knowledge creation (Bonifacio & Molani, 2003).
A systematic literature review has revealed eighteen different types of distances after removing those which appears as being synonymous (see table 1). All types of distance, affecting collaboration among group members in various ways, listed in the “Collaborative distance” table are mentioned in the literature.
[edit] A FOUR-DIMENSIONAL FRAMEWORK
In this study, the used approach is different in the fact that looking, through a multi-disciplinary literature review, at all existing types of distance and proximity previously studied has allowed to group all types of distance into four dimensions. They are representing the logical dimensions of distributed collaboration among eProfessionals.
The proposed dimensions of collaborative distance are namely structural, social, technical and legal & ethical (see Figure 1). This holistic research approach about distance factors in distributed collaboration is tentatively named “Collaborative Distance”, inducing a balanced observation of any distributed collaboration case along those four dimensions as a kind of reference framework including a holistic view of factors affecting collaboration performance. Categorized types of distance allow making various measurements that could be then eventually combined into a single overall indicator of collaborative distance.
[edit] Structural Dimension
The structural dimension includes 5 different distance types namely Configurational, Institutional, Organizational, Spatial and Temporal. It is recognized that different arrangements, in space and time, are supporting collaboration activities. Several research studies were already addressing the ways distributed teams communicate synchronously and asynchronously (DeSanctis et Al, 2001, Pauleen & Yoong, 2001).
Nevertheless, both synchronous and asynchronous interactions are recognized to be important (Olson & Olson, 2001). However, it might be very valuable to have some figures about the repartition in between the two modes of interactions. Regarding the mass collaboration style, then it is quite simple as people are only interacting asynchronously. It makes sense to be arguing that collocated team members are rather using the synchronous interaction mode while distributed team members are mainly interacting asynchronously and occasionally, when absolutely necessary or when a broadband connection is available, turning into synchronous interactions supported by ICT (i.e. telephony, web-conferencing, online chat, application sharing, whiteboard). It is also recognized that in the case of online collaboration access to information and resources is almost limitless on the Internet, web and through multiple available digital libraries (Murray, 1999).
[edit] Configurational Distance
Configurational distance deals with the distribution of resources, expertise and R&D work (Grinter et Al. 1999) through the arrangement of group members across different localizations (O’Leary & Cunnings, 2002) and the way they are connected to each other through work spaces and physical aspects of work environments (Oldham et Al., 1995). Observed factors are leadership, collaboration incentive, team membership (identity), group cohesion, competition and conflict as well as unbalanced power and expertise in decision making.
[edit] Institutional Distance
Institutional Distance is related to regional contextual developments and country’s specific regulations that are impacting collaboration performance. Observed factors are historical and political particularities as well as economical, educational and technological development, and climatic differences (Child et Al, 2000). It is also considered as learning about and understanding of a foreign environment and its national or regional culture often embedded into its specific language (Nordstrom & Vahlne, 1992). It could also be related to regional and national standards such as the metric system. It is believed that globalization effect is pushing an on-going institutional convergence of life styles, consumption patterns, human rights standards, legal frameworks and business practices (Child et Al, 2000).
[edit] Organizational Distance
Organizational Distance represents the degree to which explicit or implicit rules of interaction and routines of behavior that makes coordination more effective are different and not necessarily interoperable (Torre & Rallet, 2005). Traditional encountered factors are management overhead and coordination burden as well as different communication channels, lack of interoperability, belonging and behavioral cohesion.
[edit] Spatial Distance
Spatial Distance is an objective measurable distance among collaboration stakeholders (Wilson et Al, 2005). Physical, Geographical, Local and Territorial distance types are considered as being synonymous (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006). Spatial barrier is impeding collaboration interaction across distance (Fischer, 2005a) and makes collaborative design difficult to support even if information and communication technology (ICT) enables new forms of collaboration (Olson & Olson 2001). Related factors are a notable difficulty for building trust among collaboration stakeholders, due to the lack of collocation and face-to-face communication, and the increase of cognitive effort due to lower level of media naturalness (Kock, 2005). A temporary collocation of all stakeholders on a same location for a kick-off and later project meetings facilitates relationships creation and trust building through the use of social activities.
[edit] Temporal Distance
Temporal distance is also measurable and mainly due to time distortion in the working environment generated by collaboration across several time zones or across several working shifts or through redesign and evolution by people not necessarily involved at the earlier stage of a design process (Finholt, Sproull, & Kiesler, 2001; Fischer, 2004). A special case of collaboration with the original designers is “reflexive Computer Supported Cooperative Work” , which supports the same individual user who can be considered as two different persona at points of time that are far apart (Thimbleby et Al 1990). Long term collaboration requires that present day designers be aware of the rationale (Moran & Caroll, 1996) behind decisions that shaped the artifact and aware of information about possible alternative that were considered but not implemented.
[edit] Social Dimension
The Social dimension is also composed of 5 different distance types or classes, namely Relational, Cultural, Emotional, Lingual and Cognitive. Though, in case the cognitive distance does not include the absorptive capacity factor then it would be necessary to add a Learning distance type. All these distance types are related to social interaction factors that are facilitating or impeding knowledge sharing, mutual understanding and knowledge creation. It is widely recognized that collocated situations are facilitating social activities among team members, help everyone to better know one another and therefore facilitate the building-up of trust as well as common ground, hence mutual understanding. Another very important aspect is the ability for every group member to foresee what others are doing in order to be able to contribute where it is the most appropriate, named social and team awareness (Prinz, 1999; Schäfer et Al, 2004) or social translucence (Erickson, 2000). The use of virtual worlds to better support social translucence was already explored within a previous experimentation (Prinz et Al, 2004). However, it might be worthwhile to compare group awareness or social translucence with “social intelligence” (Goleman, 2006) which is combining social awareness - what we sense - and social facility - what we do – in order to clarify the conceptual approach of group awareness.
[edit] Relational Distance
Relational distance simply deals with the way people build-up relationships with one another. Different authors sometimes use various labels for identical concepts such as for relational distance. For example, as mentioned by Knoben and Oerlemans as another source of ambiguity (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006), the concept named “personal proximity” (Schamp, Rentmeister & Lo, 2004) and the one named “relational proximity” (Coenen, Moodysson & Asheim, 2004) are quite identical to the one named either “social distance” or “social proximity” (Boschma 2005).Obviously, building-up relationships with one another leads to the notion of social networking and the self-organizing aspect of communities often named community of practice or community of knowledge (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Brown & Duguid, 1991; 2000; Brown, Duguid & Haviland, 1994; Wenger, 1998) where members are sharing practical experiences within informal settings (Wenger, 1998). Observed induced factors are cohesion and trust level as well as motivation to share knowledge. To be noticed that heterogeneous weak ties are more appropriate when there is a greater cognitive distance that could lead to important stimuli for innovation (Nooteboom, 2000; Grabher, 2004). Luft and Ingham were arguing that larger is the interaction arena (space of mutual understanding) and more productive will be the interpersonal relationship (Luft & Ingham, 1955).
[edit] Cultural Distance
Cultural distance represents the understanding and behavioral differences among people living and working in various regions of the world and organizations. They do not communicate information, interpret it and react in the same way (Zheng Ma, Pawar & Riedel, 2006). For example, a lack of interaction habit could lead to a non-collaborative behavior (Biggs, 1996). Previous studies brought different elements in the discussion about the effect of cultural distance in the context of international diversification (Morosini et Al, 1998; Shenkar, 2001; West & Graham, 2004; Tihanyi et Al, 2005). Theoretical and empirical evidence were previously used to explain diverging findings in order to help resolving the national cultural distance paradox (Brouthers & Brouthers, 2001). Observed factors are difficulties in reaching a mutual understanding, in agreeing on organizational structures, in decision processes or communication procedures (Shane, 1994; Alexander, 2000; Pawar, Menon & Riedel, 1994). However, cultural differences contribute largely to the diversity richness which supports a higher level of creativity (Nooteboom, 2000; Bonifacio & Molani, 2003; Fischer, 2005b). Therefore, there is an interesting paradox in between homogeneous group where it is easier to reach a mutual understanding but has less creativity stimuli and heterogeneous group where it is longer to reach a mutual understanding but has more creativity stimuli.
[edit] Emotional Distance
Emotional distance represents the way an individual or a group can perceive one another feelings or emotional state or socio-emotional exchange which could be disturbing, slowing-down or even impeding a specific collaboration process such as arguments confrontation or requirements negotiation. A case study about distant negotiation has revealed that requirements negotiation meetings within computer-mediated distributed settings did not result in a decrease of performance while the ability to better sense emotional states within face-to-face meetings brings the risk of impeding the negotiation process (Damian, 2002). A recent field study on the use of shared workspace and group blogging has revealed that emotional and social distances are providing a chance to remotely start a relationship with someone who is too shy or emotional for interacting lively (Pallot et Al, 2008).
[edit] Lingual distance
Lingual distance determines the level of difficulty for a heterogeneous group of people to share meanings and understanding while at the same time it brings in diversity as languages are very much based on history, culture and tradition (Wong & Trinidad, 2004) and therefore play a key role in cultural and cognitive behaviors. A greater lingual distance is very much slowing-down or even blocking interactions among collaboration stakeholders. Encountered factors are isolation feeling, discouragement to collaborate and difficulty to establish relationships and mutual understanding while at the same time there could be more creative ideas due to the higher level of diversity.
[edit] Cognitive Distance
Cognitive distance deals with the way everyone or a specific group interprets, understands and evaluates things differently than one another (Nooteboom, 1992; 2000). In this context, Nooteboom who has introduced this concept in the literature, defines cognition as being a broad range of mental activity, including proprioception, perception, sense making, categorization, inference, value judgments, emotions, and feelings, which all build on each other. On the relation between cognitive distance and innovation performance, Nooteboom proposed that there is an inverted-U shaped curve relationship meaning that until learning by interaction can occur then cognitive distance has a positive effect on innovation capacity (Nooteboom, 1992, 1999). In case cognitive distance is too large then it is impeding learning by interaction and therefore making mutual understanding either difficult or impossible. It is very close to the famous citation that “innovation resides at the frontier of disciplines”. Absorptive capacity is recognized as an important factor in this context (Nooteboom, 2000). The innovation performance is also strongly related to the novelty effect which originates from making new combinations. They also found that the positive effect for firms is much higher when engaging in more radical, exploratory alliances than in more exploitative alliances. Another interesting aspect is to look at the way communities interact and try to better understand the meaning, the role and the importance of cognitive distance (Cohendet, 2005).
[edit] Technical Dimension
The Technical dimension includes 5 distance types or classes, namely Conceptual, Contextual, Referential, Semantic, and technological.
[edit] Conceptual Distance
Greater is the number of disciplines involved in a distributed collaboration, whatever is induced by other distance factors, and greater is the difficulty to synthesize all perspectives and colliding concepts issued by different specialists (Fischer, 2001). Conceptual barriers, mentioned as being an expertise gap, appear systematically during communication between domain experts and novices while a conceptual gap appear during communication between stakeholders from different disciplines or practices (Fischer, 2004). The last one is foreseen as a conceptual dimension between different domains. Fischer argued that collaboration can be spatially, temporally, technologically and conceptually distributed (Fischer, 2005b). In fact, conceptual distance represents the differences among concepts expressed in semantic value of the network connecting those concepts. For example, proximity expresses nearness while distant expresses farness. As farness is the antonym of nearness then one may conclude that distant is also the antonym of proximity. Distance is a concept which value is ranging from nearness (proximity) up to farness (distant). As a conclusion, greater is the proximity and smaller is the distance and vice-versa. Collaborative learning and working require a shared understanding environment in which the meanings of terms or labels, concepts and related objects can be debated and resolved (Resnick, 1991).
[edit] Contextual Distance
Contextual issues affect knowledge application in various situations that are leading to improved problem solving in the workplace. For example, a context menu provides, to the user, a set of specific contextualized actions according to the nature of the selected object. It means that knowing about the context of specific activities allows connecting various pieces of information and creating possible paths for the user. It also provides functionality for updating and extending its content allowing people from the workplace to become content providers. Thus, it is argued that ICT can help bridging contextual distance (Demetriadis et Al, 2005) in designing context awareness (Gross & Prinz, 2003). Context awareness, within computer science, refers to the idea that computers can both sense and react based on their environment.
[edit] Referential Distance
Referential distance corresponds to the distance between the point of origin and the correlating document measured by the number of the minimally necessary references. In this way it is possible to describe the potential relevance of a document compared to the origin of referencing. If the referential distance increases, the relevance can be expected to decrease (Fuchs-Kittowski & Köhler, 2005).
[edit] Semantic Distance
Semantic distance, as well as semantic relatedness and semantic similarity (inverse of distance, also known as semantic proximity), represents the level of relationship from one term to one another. It could be expressed by a number ranging from -1 up to 1, or between 0 and 1, where 1 display high relatedness and 0 for none. Ontologies help to define a distance between terms or words in tracking nodes and edges in graph representations. Statistical tools such as vector space model are used to correlate words and textual contexts from a suitable text corpus (co-occurrence). Semantic differential is another way of looking at semantic distance through potential rating scale used to measure the connotative meaning of terms or concepts.
[edit] Technological Distance
Technological distance is the result of the differences between the use of various technologies that could be either Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) or production technologies and even a combination of other technology types (i.e. Biology). Collaboration activities are potentially enhanced as collaborative technologies enable individuals to contribute with their own specificities to the collective work (DeSanctis et Al, 2001). However, distributed group members should have a mutual understanding about the collaborative technologies (Mulder, 2002) and their availability at their own location (Mayben et Al, 2003). It is argued that very often individuals do not feel comfortable with using ICT to support distant collaboration (Pauleen & Yoong, 2001). Distributed group members should have a mutual understanding about how to use collaborative technologies (Mulder, 2002), hence it may explain the highly usage rate of both telephone and electronic mailing technologies as almost everyone, nowadays, is able to use them properly. A quite synonymous of Technological distance is Industrial distance as it is often related to organizations using similar or close production technologies (Hyypiä & Kautonen 2005). Technological distance is resulting from the differences between the amount or maturity level of technological knowledge that one can learn from one another, hence the link with the absorptive capacity. A lower technological distance (nearness) among collaboration stakeholders facilitates the acquisition and development of technological knowledge and technologies (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006). Technological distance is linked to the concept of absorptive capacity as being the ability to assimilate and apply external knowledge (Nooteboom, 2000; Cohen & Levinthal 1990)
[edit] Legal and ethical Dimension
Legal and ethical aspects should not be neglected as there are demonstrated relationships with social implications, exploitation objectives, security and confidentiality agreements as well as privacy and inclusion concerns which are often leading to conflicting situations among collaboration stakeholders. Social implications are related on the one hand to trust building and mutual confidence among stakeholders. On the other hand, social implications are related to public and management recognition, such as rewarding mechanism and awards, as well as learning, pre-emptive protection, control, and enabling commercial production of the outcome as demonstrated in a previous study (Sawhney, 2002). This dimension is often simply ignored within previous empirical studies while it would deserve to receive much more attention as the implications of legal and ethical distance factors could easily turn any collaboration into a very low performance when wrongly addressed.
[edit] Ownership Distance
Ownership distance is related to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), patenting and copyrighting as well as “open source design” or “creative commons”. Sawhney is arguing that Intellectual property rights (IPR) play an important role in making design innovations accessible to target communities and producers in developing countries (Sawhney, 2002). Property rights in scientific research and academic settings have always caused passionate debate whether it should have a public or commercial nature. Currently, there are two opposite trends. On the one hand, there is a willingness to promote greater commercialization of research through formal IPR mechanisms like patents and copyrights. On the other hand, there is a growing support for greater openness towards academic programs and research through Open Source initiatives (Sawhney, 2002) and for open mass collaboration (i.e. Wiki) through Creative Commons (Pallot et Al, 2006). Ristau Baca is arguing that while the Creative Commons licensing system has achieved major recognition and use, its application to scientific transactions presents major challenges as it involves copyrighted works based on individual licensing creative works for use on the Internet while a Science Commons license implies a transfer of physical goods or information not subject to copyright (Ristau Baca, 2006). According to Ristau Baca, Science Commons, in contrast, involves significantly more complex and sophisticated parties but a properly implemented Science Commons license could help bridging ownership distance (Ristau Baca, 2006).
[edit] Financial Distance
Hart and Moore argued that the value of a business relation depends on the participation of the parties to the relation and investments made (Hart & Moore, 1990). Some player’s participation may be indispensable to an asset and in case it does not participate in the venture then the asset may not be productive at all. Financial investment behavior is often related to past collaboration experiences and confidence in the fact that there is no financial investment gap or distance with other partners. Some investments are relation or asset specific meaning that their value outside the relation is very low (Hart and Moore, 1990).
[edit] Contractual Distance
Contractual distance is related to the aspect of specifying participants’ rights and obligations within different conceivable circumstances that may occur during a collaboration project. Many contingencies may not be possible to foresee, or even if that would be the case, it would most likely be prohibitively expensive to draft contracts encompassing all conceivable contingencies as argued by Hart and Moore in a theory of property rights based on incentives (Hart and Moore, 1990). Hence, many contingencies, often related to Intellectual Property Rights, security and confidentiality as well as ethical aspect such as privacy and inclusion (Silverston, 2004), are not properly addressed in contracts and therefore create contractual distance among parties that may impact collaboration performance. The security aspect is not a minor issue as it appears to be one of the necessary conditions enabling trust building among distributed collaboration stakeholders, especially in the context of the Internet and the Web (Appelt et Al, 2007). Furthermore, national regulations regarding the use of ICT might differ from one country to one another that are also creating contractual distance regarding the protection of ownership, security and privacy. In case a group of partners do not share certain concerns then virtual mediation is not going to create proximity such as ethical proximity even if ICT appears like compressing spatial distance (Introna, 2005).
