Statelets: Coordination of Social Collaboration Processes

Today people work together across time, space, cultural and organizational boundaries. To simplify and automate the work, collaboration employs a broad range of tools, such as project management software, groupware, social networking services, or wikis. For a collaboration to be effective, the actions of collaborators need to be properly coordinated, which requires taking into account social, structural, and semantic relations among actors and processes involved. This information is not usually available from a single source, but is spread across collaboration systems and tools. Providing a unified access to this data allows not only to establish a complete picture of the collaboration environment, but also to automate the coordination decision making by specifying formal rules that reflect social and semantic context effects on the ongoing collaboration processes. In this paper we present Statelets, a coordination framework and language for support and coordination of collaboration processes spanning multiple groupware tools and social networking sites, and demonstrate its suitability in several use cases.