The collaboration architecture was effective because it built upon a theory that identified the interactions needed for productive discussion and problem solving, and also, provided ways to reduce the obstacles to such interactions that arise with a large, dispersed group of participants.Īfter first describing the Open Meeting event, we examine the general theory it embodies as a guide for other wide-area collaboration applications. The resulting policy conversations, which crossed traditional agency boundaries, mobilized support for the proposals, helped refine them and gave NPR feedback on their recommendations. The collaboration system implemented for this meeting enabled the participants to find and discuss proposals for bureaucratic reforms, which had been prepared by the National Performance Review (NPR). After reviewing the architecture and performance of the system in this Open Meeting, the paper closes with discussion of lessons learned and suggestions for future research.Ī recent Open Meeting of several thousand Federal workers under the auspices of Vice President Al Gore demonstrated that the World Wide Web can support productive, wide-area collaboration for policy planning and problem solving. Timely delivery of newly moderated comments kept the conversation gain at a level comparable to tightly-focused mailing lists threading out from specific points in the hypertext. Persistent actions enforced constraints on man-machine tasks, such as moderation workflow. These policy conversations were structured according to a link grammar that constrained the types of comments which could be attached in specific discourse contexts. The users participated in policy planning as they discussed, evaluated, and critiqued recommendations by linking their comments to points in the evolving policy hypertext. It provided users access over SMTP and HTTP to hypertext synthesized from an object database and structured with knowledge representation techniques, including a light-weight semantics based on argument connectives. A theory for managing wide-area collaboration guided the implementation as it extended an earlier system developed to publish electronic documents. The system supported a large online meeting with over 4000 participants and successfully achieved all its design goals. Abstract: An asynchronous collaboration system was developed for Vice President AL Gore’s Open Meeting on the National Performance Review.

Freenx centos 7