Toxic Farm: A cooperative management platform for virtual teams and enterprises

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Toxic Farm A cooperative management platform for
virtual teams and enterprises

• Hala Skaf-Molli,
• Pascal Molli, Gerald Oster and Claude Godart
• LORIA, INRIA-Lorraine, France
• ECOO Team
• www.loria.fr/equipes/ecoo/
• Pradeep Ray, Fethi Rabhi
• School of Information Systems, Technology and
  Management, University of New South Wales,
  Australia

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Virtual Team

• Team
• Group of people who interact to achieve a common
  goal.
• Virtual
• Distributed across time, space and organizations.
• Linked by webs of communication technologies.

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Why Virtual Teams ?

• Quickly gathered core competencies of different
  organizations
• Work is achieved in a competitive time
• High-productivity, mobility

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Categories of Services

• Data sharing
• From ftp to configuration management
• Communication
• Synchronous from video conf to application
  sharing
• Asynchronous from mailing lists to online forums
• Coordination
• From ToDo-Lists to workflows
• Awareness
• Presence, activity, process, context, group

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How to Support Virtual Teams ?

• Do it yourself
• Not efficient
• Host virtual team by web services providers
• BSCW Reference of CSCW community for shared
  workspace, a commercial product now
• SourceForge 60 000 open source projects, 600
  000 virtual members
• Main service service instantiation ! more
  efficient than installing tools yourself.

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Problem

• Quality of the platform
• Quality of instantiated services
• Quality of integration of instantiated services
• EX CVS is not really integrated with the rest of
  the platform in SourceForge
• Poor awareness, poor integration with
  coordination services

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Objective

• Develop a platform to support virtual team
• Good services for virtual team.
• Well integrated services.

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Toxic Farm Architecture

• Framework
• 1 generic kernel
• N specific environments
• Used in
• E-learning http//www.loria.fr/equipes/ecoo/coop
  era/
• Software Development http//www.libresource.org/

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Responsibilities in Toxic Farm

• Kernel users management, events management,
  security management, accounting, administration,
  generic services instantiation.
• Generic services data sharing, synchronous and
  asynchronous communication, coordination,
  awareness.
• DOE Software engineering (libresource), CSCL
  (coopera).

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WS Instantiation Projects
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Data Sharing Service

• Ubiquitous access to private workspace

Local Workspace at home
Bilal
Toxic Kernel Users, Events, Security,
Accounting WS Instantiation, Administration.
Private Workspace
Synchronize
Project Foo Repository
Local Workspace at office
Update/commit
Hala
Private Workspace
Synchronize
Local Workspace at office
Project Bar Repository
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Data Sharing Service
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Data Sharing Service

• Availability of private workspace on the server
• Ubiquitous access.
• Important event source more awareness.
• Can be coupled with coordination service.

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Coordination Service

• Flexible workflow Bonita http//bonita.debian-sf
  .objectweb.org/index.html
• Enable process oriented work.
• Integrated with data sharing
• a workspace is associated with an activity

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Bonita Workflow Editor
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Awareness Service

• Who is doing what, when, where, why ?
• Presence awareness IM tools
• Activity awareness
• Data sharing events (notification)
• State awareness Uptodate, Modified, Remotely
  Modified, Conflict.
• Process awareness
• Workflow events

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Toxic Farm Services
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State Awareness Widget
mam
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Activity Awareness Widget
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Activity Awareness
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Conclusion

• Toxic Farm Open cooperative management platform
  for virtual teams and enterprises.
• Quality of platformquality of servicesquality
  of integration
• Case study Virtual team in the global financial
  industry.
• Try it on woinville.loria.fr