Web Enabled Design Collaboration in India

Designing large scale real estate projects often requires collaboration between consultants and agencies that are located in different geographical areas. The added constraint of geographical distance to a design approach that already involves multiple participants makes design collaboration a particularly challenging task. This study hypothesizes that design collaboration could benefit from harnessing web technologies. Organizational Risk Analyzer (ORA) software was used to identify the key factors of a collaboration network in a design project located in Kolkata, India. The web enabled internet forum system used was compared with the more traditional system of collaboration using mail. The collaborative network factors like connectedness, density, diffusion, centralization degree, and the node level factors like closeness centrality, eigenvector, betweenness and Burt constraint indicate that internet forums provide a more efficient tool of collaboration than traditional mail network systems. A simulation shows that the forum network operated even in an adverse condition, for example, when the project manager, a key member of the collaboration team, was unavailable. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2020-9.ch007