Making Groupware Social: The Case of a Cooperative Platform for Surgeons

This contribution describes the extension of a groupware platform with social media concepts to realize a learning and knowledge platform for surgeons, considering specific constraints from the medical domain. We start with a model that equally represents groupware and social software. The instantiation of this model enables the stepwise integration of social features into the groupware system. An important part of the instantiation process is the simplification of the given groupware system and its enrichment by core features of social software. The newly developed platform gets tailored to the surgical domain to fit a practical application domain. We describe in detail the process of modeling and integration of the systems and report about the experiences and lessons learned during this process as well as the user feedback.