Models and their Role in Collaboration

UPDATE: The proceedings for the workshop are now available online.

Using visual representations of work or business processes can be considered a common practice in modern organizations. These models serve a large variety of different purposes such as documentation of current practices, or informing and planning change or software development. Given the nature of work and businesses they reflect it is reasonable to develop and use them collaboratively. There are, however, also many downsides to collaborative model usage and development in current practice. Among others, models are often not fully understood and are thus not used by people who work in the processes the models represent, resulting in limited impact of process redesigns on everyday work. Furthermore, only a minority of people within organizations actually use, even though they have been proven to be very useful especially for collaborative work. Given the increasing popularity of models in organizations, understanding and defining their role in collaboration is of vital interest for the CSCW community and therefore this workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners and forming a community for research in this area.

In this workshop we want to bring together researchers, lecturers and practitioners from different fields, who are interested in the collaborative usage and development and sustainment of structured visual representations such as process models, conceptual models or mind maps. This includes experiences from empirical case studies, teaching and the introduction of models and modeling into organizations. Furthermore the workshop also welcomes contributions describing research upon understanding the way models are used in organizations, coupled with activities and artifacts of everyday work and their role in collaborative work. The workshop will also host a special demo track where systems supporting collaboration on and with models can be presented.

This workshop is a follow up to the workshop on “Collaborative usage and development of models and visualization” held at ECSCW 2011 (proceedings are available online), which resulted in a special issue of the International Journal for eCollaboration (2013, in press). For this workshop the organizers are planning a similar course of events.