Virtual Peer Communities and the Community Coordinator

The organization of resources/peers in communities is suggested to be an efficient way for resource discovery, but effectiveness of proposed communities depends on the active role and responsibility of a “Community Coordinator”. Communities are pools of diverse peers/services sharing and controlling resources and which have “agreed” to co-operate to enhance their usability; such co-operation needs co-ordination mechanism, negotiated policies, monitoring and leadership to re-solve disputes. In this paper we will outline the role of a Community Coordinator to sustain the effective working of the community and to provide the general framework for community formation. Later we will compare the role of communities in different environment, e.g. E-Commerce, Enterprise Virtual Organization and Grid Environment which influence the overall functionality of the Coordinator. This work is related to our previous and on going work on “Community Formation” [1], [2] and [3]. Main focus of this paper is to address expectations from the Coordinator along with its responsibilities and capabilities.