Written Description The Communities of Practice Environment (CoPE) is a novel software platform for supporting cooperative effort among formal and informal groups of people who may be separated in time, space, and language. Essentially all previous group-oriented software has focused on one of two approaches: 1) systems for institutional settings, probably because institutions have the most resources; and 2) groups of small scope and limited interaction, for which extremely process-rigid free products (such as Google or Yahoo Groups) are provided. But there are many thousands of voluntary organizations that can benefit from software that helps them work together and achieve concrete goals beyond what is available through existing products. We have developed such a system, called CoPE, implemented it, and deployed it in a variety of user environments. CoPE does not depend on technically sophisticated users or on supporting institutional structures – in fact, CoPE itself can provide the mechanism for groups to establish their preferred working style and institutional memory. From the technology perspective, CoPE brings together the concepts of content management, group discussion, and decision-making processes to form a customizable system manageable by non-technical users. Content management is a well-known concept both in traditional physical offices and in modern electronic information systems. The concepts of meetings, brainstorming, and working sessions are common means for conducting decision-making processes in face-to-face interaction. Similarly, there are modern electronic information systems that facilitate communication and collaboration. The CoPE system combines electronic content management and modern electronic collaboration and governance systems to enable a type of workflow more streamlined and more capable than current alternatives. It facilitates any kind of cooperative activity whose output can be captured digitally, but is especially useful when group decisions must be made. This unique capability should prove attractive to vendors of portal systems who compete for the loyalty of wide ranging user communities. The CoPE system relies heavily on parameterization to strike a balance between the expense of highly customizable enterprise-scale collaboration systems and process-rigid free systems. The CoPE system provides a level of customization based upon discrete sets of pre-designed parameters that determine content organization, style, decision-making process types, user access and notification, and other similar characteristics. The choice of these characteristics is not arbitrary; rather, it results from theories of organizational behavior and from extensive user testing. The encapsulation and parameterization of community governance practices is a unique contribution of the CoPE architecture. The testing protocol can be applied to various target groups to determine appropriate sets of parameters for the classes of organizations those groups represent. The CoPE system is being designed to be released as a package with these customization capabilities already installed. A user group lacking sophisticated technical knowledge or the resources to acquire such knowledge will thus be able to deploy and customize the system to their needs via the parameterization structure described above. The extent of specific expertise required will be limited to the ability to learn to operate the web-based interface used to set the system parameters. In addition to this limited technical expertise requirement, one or more individuals will serve as “coordinators.” The person filling this role will be responsible for coordinating those processes and activities that require manual user administration. Such activities include vetting CoPE membership, structuring discussion around documents, selecting appropriate models of decision-making for various processes, and providing necessaryinformation to the system (e.g., deadlines, members of various groups, access permissions, document organizational structure, etc.). These tasks require no specialized technical expertise. The ability to work collaboratively in an asynchronous manner is not novel to the field of information technology. However, the integrated capabilities of CoPE are novel and provide added utility and efficiency to a very wide range of pursuits. For example, typical work products include organizational actions and minutes, public or web releases, operational manuals, process schedules, and best practices guidelines. For many groups, CoPE can provide the central organizing mechanism for all of their activities. Reduction to Practice We have achieved initial Reduction to Practice by providing an Internet-based information system through which users can carry out all the essential CoPE functions and have deployed this system in two quite different environments. The initial results are very encouraging. Users have exploited the ability to post documents, have conducted organized discussion of those documents, have searched the archives, and have voted/decided on the documents through a process structured by the system. The visible software for the initial implementation is based on Plone© (http://www.plone.org) which operates on the Zope© (http://www.zope.org) platform. The two pilot deployments involved very different user groups. The first group (CVP) consists of people who are widely dispersed geographically, are not experienced computer users, and are not all comfortable in English. The organization is a public one and there is contention for resources and other controversy within the group. This group has been using the CoPE since Fall 2004 and has exploited the archiving capability to organize past as well as ongoing activities. The second pilot group (CogFac) comprises faculty members at a major research university. They are all sophisticated users and some are computer scientists who do research on software. The group itself is the teaching faculty of a program that is not a university department, which means that the group members are scattered across the campus and have incompatible schedules, making it very hard to meet. This group has conducted all of its business using the CoPE in the fall semester of 2004, without a single physical meeting. For both pilot groups, the CoPE provides the first usable record of its activities after years or decades of prior
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