Process Enactment in Virtual Software Organizations

The conventional approach to process enactment employs a client-server architecture, in which a central engine executes process descriptions and often stores documents produced by the processes. This approach has been successful for automating processes in many situations. However, it relies on a significant centralized computing infrastructure, which does not fit distributed, loosely coupled “virtual organizations” such as open source software projects. This paper presents a process enactment solution for such virtual organizations, based on three important features: A completely distributed, peer-topeer architecture that eliminates the need for centralized computing and organizational infrastructure; process modeling based on independent process fragments that can be performed by a single individual actor; and, coordination entirely through products produced and consumed by concurrent processes.