This paper focuses on the main question whether social media specifically conceived to enable local exchange trading schema can be adopted in different contexts than the western digitized society, where those systems have been considered a feasible alternative to money-based capitalism. We report a qualitative study employing focus groups to study the factors which may affect the adoption of these social media in Bangladesh, a developing country that exhibits characteristics such as strong young unemployment, gender-oriented underemployment, aging population, but also a reduced access to the service economy due to the lack of spare time. The benefits of local exchange seem to be particularly fitting the urban and social structure of Bangladesh.

In this paper we present a novel model of knowledge creation and diffusion (viz. the Knowledge-Stream model) in communities of knowledgeable citizens (viz. knowing communities). This model takes into account the individual, social and cultural dimensions of knowledge (what we denote as co-knowledge) to account for the various ways knowledge is "circulated" among people (i.e., members of any social structure); we also propose the concept of IT Knowledge Artifact, as the technological driver enabling such a circulation, and exemplify its main roles in a citizen science project that we are going to undertake in the domains of the urban cultural heritage and the food- and diet-related traditions.

This paper focuses on tight communities and specifically on the distributed, mediated discourses that their members articulate around documents and inscribed material artifacts. The paper presents a prototype-based design experience toward the definition of a collaborative annotation tool that is endowed with discourse oriented functionalities whose main characteristics have emerged from case studies we undertook in the healthcare and agricultural domains. In latter domain an initial prototype was proposed and progressively tuned to help users propose modifications to an institutional document through the expression of comments gathered around and about a common artifact, and then build a representative summary of the opinions emerging within the community as a result of this distributed discussion. In light of the reported case study, we discuss a new perspective on this class of annotating applications and the related functionalities that could realize a new simplified model of discourse and foster its adoption in distributed settings and communities of practice.

In recent years, visual languages have become increasingly popular in the educational domain. But also researchers involved in other application domains are progressively looking at the potential of visual languages to make difficult tasks, as programming is, easier. In this paper we present the research we have conducted to provide end-users of a document management system with a visual language and the related editor by which to define content-based and context-aware rules. Rules are intended to be the proactive components of electronic documents and the visual rule editor we developed is aimed at empowering end-users and domain experts in making their documents more active with respect to both content, context and the users' interactions.

The paper proposes an approach to EUD focusing on communities: on the one hand, users are considered as a community of cooperating actors; on the other hand, applications and devices are considered as a (artificial) community that, by interacting with those actors, cooperate to support their collaboration. This idea facilitates an integration based on modularization and abstraction, by applying to the technology principles that are derived from human collaboration: in so doing, it others a uniform approach that allows users with different technical capabilities to operate at different levels of abstraction by applying the same conceptual tools. The community metaphor inspires a model that helps the users community integrating devices and applications according to its needs. In turn, the model defines a layered structure of primitives: from the basic ones up to the domain and application dependent ones, passing through the domain and application independent primitives. The approach is illustrated by an example in the education domain: the interaction flows in an augmented classroom can be defined and adapted by communities where teachers, tutors and students organize their collaboration.

The paper shows how redundancy can be put at work to play a positive role in facilitating the cognitive and coordinative tasks of clinicians in a ward setting. The main requirement to accomplish this positive function is to allow and support clinicians in annotating the clinical record and making correlations between redundant data explicit. We report an observational study we undertook in the design of coordination mechanisms based on a minimal set of meaningful correlations.

Clinical Pathways (CPs) are artifacts that clinicians are increasingly introducing in their practices in order to deal with health problems in the most effective, efficient and agreed way. As a result of an observational study at a Neonatology Intensive Care Unit, we found that most CPs are still paper-based. Although perceived useful even on paper, the physicians advocated a system integrating CPs with the clinical record. Based on their requirements, we present a proposal on how to conceive a computational system that can promote awareness in order to achieve better coordination and committed inclusion of pathways in daily clinical practice.

The paper focuses on collaboration that is achieved inside communities thriving within organizations. The nature of the communities and their connections with the institutional technologies embedding the organizational prescriptions require the construction of places where the communities can construct and maintain their local memory, policies and conventions. The paper proposes a framework (i.e., a model and the related language) supporting the construction of such places (i.e., fulcra) and illustrates its use by means of a scenario derived from previous empirical investigations on communities of practice

The paper proposes a model to design collaboration supports in pervasive environments through the notion of community. As in human communities, the degree of participation of a member can dynamically change in relation both to her physical location and to her position in the logical space of the applications the community uses to cooperate. The paper shows how this approach is able to make pervasive environments reactive to user behavior on the basis of a semantically rich context representation

The paper discusses the role of redundancy in hospital ward work on the basis of a field study that focuses on the use of paper artifacts supporting healthcare and its coordination. On the basis of literature and direct observations, we identified different kinds of redundancy, i.e. redundancy of effort, functions and data. Hence, we analyzed how these different forms of redundancy may affect each other and the coordination inside hospital wards. Redundancy plays a positive or negative role depending on various circumstances. This twofold nature defines different requirements for a technology to support healthcare and ward work by preserving practices linked to paper-based artifacts and by unobtrusively augmenting them with computational capabilities.

The paper describes a framework supporting the creation of 3D user interfaces to visualize awareness information about the cooperation context of distributed actors. The paper discusses the motivations behind the framework and illustrates ThreeDmap, an editor allowing the creation and customization of 3D interfaces supporting the perception of awareness information.

To address the development of complex systems, the definition of novel models that capture their nature and provide developers with abstractions and technologies to both imagine and implement effective solutions is needed. Promising models are those based on multi agent systems, since they naturally capture the concept of independent entities interacting in an environment. This paper presents a model and discusses its social interaction mechanisms to support multi-agent systems. The model, called the reaction diffusion machine (RDM), addresses the definition of environments hosting situated agents that may interact and move. Peculiarities of RDM are the inclusion of the topology of the space as a primitive aspect, and the definition of a interaction protocol that is based on the concept of distance among agents. The discussion on mechanisms addresses the issues to develop a framework that implements the model.

The overview of a set of field studies highlights how different are the scenarios in which classification schemes (CS) play a role in cooperation. In all cases, adaptability is claimed as a fundamental requirement for their usability and effective usage. What adaptability means for CS is not an easy question. The paper tries to articulate this requirement and derive implications on the design of a supportive technology. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The existing computational mechanisms for promoting awareness are based on Awareness Models referring to spatial metaphors.These models are mainly based on the notions of focus and nimbus which allow one to compute different measures of awareness between objects.The point made in this paper is that these approaches are focused on how awareness information is produced and perceived but not on how it affects the behavior of the objects.This aspect is relevant if one takes seriously the issue of making awareness mechanisms fully visible and accessible to the involved actors for the purpose of adaptability.We propose the reaction-diffusion metaphor in order to deal with the above requirements.The related Model of Awareness is presented, compared with the Spatial Models and illustrated by some examples.

The need of supporting office work with suitable computer based tools implies the investigation of the deep aspects of cooperation within the office. Cooperation, to the extent that is made up of communication and coordination, can be fully characterized under the assumption that an office is a special linguistic game, constituted by a set of rules defining the conversations possible within it, continuously changing under the perturbations created by the speech acts its member do performing the conversations. Within this conceptual context, a prototypal software package, CHAOS-1, is presented. CHAOS-1 aims both at supporting the conversations and at improving coordination of the office activities.This paper discusses CHAOS-1 with respect to similar proposals, presents its overall architecture, shows some examples of its use and sketches its new releases under development.