Annotated Bibliography of Coordination
From EQUIS Lab Wiki
Annotated Bibliography for Coordination
Group Members
- Joey Pape
Papers
Presents coordination theory, "a body of principles about how activities can be coordinated". The paper points out that coordination theory is relevant to a number of different fields, including sociology, anthropology, law and political science. It gives some examples in which ideas for coordination theory were used in CSCW.
A useful set of definitions of coordination components are then presented. One or more actors perform some activities towards some end. A goal is the end towards which the activities are directed. The activities often have interdependencies, such as one activity being a prerequisite for another, or two activities requiring the use of a shared resource. Throughout the paper a number of definitions for coordination are also given.
Malone, T.W., Crowston, K. (1994). The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination
This paper covers a lot of the same ground as Crowston and Malone [1990]. A framework is described which studies the dependencies among activities in coordination, and the processes which manage those dependencies. For example, a shared resource dependency might be solved by a "first come/first serve" process, or perhaps a bidding process. Two processes mentioned because they are not easily described as processes to handle dependencies, but are still important, were group decision making and communication.
The paper goes on to give examples of how this type of analysis could be done in different disciplines. The examples given are (1) understanding the effects of information technology on organizations an markets (2) designing cooperative work systems (3) designing parallel computer systems.
The paper concludes with a research agenda to develop coordination theory and a short conclusion.
Li, D. (1998). COCA: Collaborative Objects Coordination Architecture
Presents COCA, a system for developing collaborative systems. The motivation of COCA is to define the coordination of collaborative systems separately from the computation. This makes the coordination more easily manageable, as pieces of the system which handle coordination are not scattered throughout the code. COCA has users dynamically taking certain roles. The rules which govern a users interaction are dictated by their role.
The paper presents the COCA architecture and then walks through an example of how it would be used to design the coordination for a distributed slide viewing program.
The paper presents some useful ideas. It seems to assume that the reader is familiar with programming in Prolog (which I unfortunately don't).
