Awareness Information To Support Collaboration Among Heterogeneous Communities: The Case Of Care Networks

In several domains like healthcare, collaborative design and cultural resources management, the highly distributed cooperation that characterizes all of them often raise coordination conflicts and collaborative problems. These problems require a suitable technological support that could make the members of the groups involved in these collaborative practices aware of the crucial information that is generated in the other groups. In this paper, we propose a framework for the design of such technological supports and illustrate its application by means of an articulated healthcare scenario. Our framework allows users to: manage the creation and application of rules that are specific and "local" to their group; manage the exchange of rules, and hence "procedural knowledge", across and among different groups; conceive predefined procedures that are considered as "carriers" of contextual information rather than models of prescriptive behavior; become mutually aware of interdependent task articulation as a basic support of inter-group collaboration; get facilitated access to the relevant information that supports their collaborative activities