Software Engineering || Net-Centric Computing || Postdoc & Visiting Scholars

   RULE-MITIGATED COLLABORATION (Patent Pending)

         The design of an appropriate paradigm for collaboration ultimately stands or falls on the question of whether human users are able to cooperate effectively with it. In this work, we begin with a paradigm of interaction in which human collaborators have shown themselves facile. This paradigm is based on the formal meeting protocol commonly known as parliamentary procedure or Robert's Rules of Order (RRO). These rules are at the same time descriptive and prescriptive of effective meeting behavior. First, it is a derivation of observation and experience of how people may maintain orderly and productive meetings. Second, it formalizes and prescribes these rules to further facilitate formal interaction.

          One may think of the RRO as a protocol to regulate and manage the use of time and communication channel resources. In regular meetings the communication channels are the atmosphere that carries the speaker's voice and the visual attention of the audience for presentation. RRO specifies the maintenance of meeting logs in the form of minutes, and permits the production of such complex products as the budgets of entire nations. Electronic meeting systems, likewise, have to manage time and communicative resources, maintain logs, and produce artifacts that constitute the fruit of the collaboration. The technology disclosed here facilitates the generation of co-authored artifacts (documents, designs, project plans, etc.) as the direct outcome of the collaborative process.

        The efficacy of rule-mitigated collaboration technology is based on four major components:

An extended parliamentary procedure rule set adapted for network and parallel operation.
A scoping policy and set of application programming interfaces that facilitate multiple simultaneous access, multi-application, conflict resolution, and configuration control and update for collaboration-aware applications.
An object-based client-server architecture that maintains a set of databases, supports member communications, maintains the state of the collaboration and discussions, and implements a replication scheme to keeps collaboration client data synchronized with the state of the collaboration.
An M-Net synchronous meeting environment that permits users to gather in real-time virtual meetings for time and synchronization critical discussion and decision making.

        The first two components constitute the novel technological concepts in this disclosure, and the latter two provide the vehicle for their implementation.

International Center for Software Engineering

Iowa State Univerisity,  Department of Computer Science

226 Atanasoff Hall, Ames, IA 50011

1-515-294-4377 (Office) 1-515-294-0258(Fax) E-mail: chang@cs.iastate.edu

Copyright © 2002, Prof. Carl K. Chang