System requirements for large scale community collaboration

Work is becoming more collaborative in business and public enterprises. The goal of enabling collaboration is to share knowledge and develop new innovative outcomes. Enterprises are increasingly faced with providing communication systems to support the collaboration and for people to share knowledge to work collaboratively. Collaboration now often goes beyond supporting small teams but increasingly requires collaboration across large enterprises. This growing importance of collaboration in large scale evolving systems is calling for ways to use new communication technologies, especially those based on Web 2.0, to support enterprise wide collaboration.This paper proposes a framework to facilitate large scale collaboration by developing a collaborative architecture and ways to convert it to supporting technology. The framework uses an ensemble of communities all working to a common vision as the basis for the collaborative architecture. The paper defines a model for communities coordinate to collaborate and work towards a common vision. It distinguishes between different kinds of activities in community collaboration and how they can be integrated by developing a collaborative architecture to foster the relationships needed for effective collaboration. The paper then proposes the roles needed to support collaboration and how to support these roles and their interaction.