DMC 2009 Distributed and Mobile Collaboration Workshop Report

Distributed and mobile collaboration technologies continue to play an important role in supporting complex, flexible and interconnected collaborations within networked enterprises and e-science. The latest trends in distributed and mobile collaboration technologies allow people to work across organizational boundaries, to collaborate among/in organizations and communities and to be part of the collaborative activities, such as sharing and co- developing data, information, content, knowledge, models and services. New computing models and technologies, such as mobile Web, Web 2.0 and social-aware software have fostered the participation of individuals, teams and communities in contributing and generating data, information, content and models. However, challenges exist in how collaborative software can support individuals, teams and communities to easily co-develop and manage such data, information, content and models in a coherent and consistent way, while still are simple to use and suitable for dynamic and spontaneous collaboration behavior of individuals and communities. As a contribution to the solutions for these challenges, Cicchetti and his colleagues propose the DISCOM, a framework for synchronous and asynchronous concurrent and collaborative modeling in the paper entitled Towards a framework for distributed and collaborative modeling. DISCOM ideas are not only to support users to share models and contents but also to allow them to collaboratively design models while DISCOM manages model versions and handles conflicts due to the concurrent modeling. Designed to support spontaneous collaboration at application level, it is flexible and suitable for individuals, teams, communities and networked enterprises.