=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=MoRoCo 2013: Models and their Role in Collaboration
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1037/moroco_introduction.pdf
|volume=Vol-1037
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ecscw/NoltePRO13
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==MoRoCo 2013: Models and their Role in Collaboration==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1037/moroco_introduction.pdf
In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop
on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)
MoRoCo 2013: Models and their Role in
Collaboration
Alexander Nolte1, Michael Prilla1, Peter Rittgen2, Stefan Oppl3
1
Department Information and Technology Management, University of Bochum,
Germany
nolte@iaw.rub.de, prilla@iaw.rub.de
2
School of Business and IT, University of Borås, Sweden
peter.rittgen@hb.se
3
Department of Business Information Systems, Johannes Kepler University of
Linz, Austria
stefan.oppl@jku.at
Abstract. Using visual representations of work or business processes can be considered
a common practice in modern organizations. These models serve a large variety of
different purposes such as documentation of current practices, or informing and planning
change or software development. Given the nature of work and businesses they reflect it
is reasonable to develop and use them collaboratively. There are, however, also many
downsides to collaborative model usage and development in current practice. Among
others, models are often not fully understood and are thus not used by people who work
in the processes the models represent, resulting in limited impact of process redesign on
everyday work. Furthermore, only a minority of people within organizations actually use
models, even though they have been proven to be very useful especially for collaborative
work. Given the increasing popularity of models in organizations, understanding and
defining their role in collaboration is of vital interest for the CSCW community and
therefore this workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners and
forming a community for research in this area.
1
In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop
on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)
Introduction
The usage of visual representations of static parts of an organization (e.g.
diagrams depicting hierarchies in the organization’s structure or a company’s
competences), dynamic aspects (e.g. work and business processes) or results of
creative problem-solving sessions (e.g. brainstorming results) can be considered a
common practice in modern organizations. These visual representations include
process models, conceptual models and mind maps. They are used for multiple
tasks such as software development, design and engineering, process optimization
and reengineering as well as marketing and strategic development. Obviously,
these models are hardly ever artifacts that are used and developed by single users
for their own personal needs. They are rather developed for larger target groups
throughout an organization to support them in sense making and creating a shared
understanding about cooperative work and its interfaces. Consequently, they are
both used by many people and developed collaboratively. However, the number of
people that are affected by these representations is usually larger than the number
of people who participate actively in their development. The need to create
communicable and comprehensible models is thus evident.
Alongside the increasing usage and popularity of visual representations in
organizations, there also is growing interest in their usage and development in the
CSCW1 community. This comprises not only the usage and development by
modeling experts, but explicitly takes users into account that are no experts in
modeling, thus including factors that might motivate or hinder them to use models
and actively participate in their development. The emerging importance of this
new field of CSCW research is reflected by workshops (e.g. “TAProViz” at BPM
2012 and “CollabViz” at ECSCW 2011), tracks at international conferences (e.g.
“Collaborative Modeling” at HICSS 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012), papers at
various CSCW related conferences (e.g. Baacke, Rohner, Winter & Fitterer, 2009;
Brosch, Seidl, Wieland, Wimmer & Langer, 2009; Herrmann & Nolte, 2010;
Klebl, Hackel & Lukosch, 2009; Nolte & Prilla, 2012), journal contributions
(Heer, Bostock & Ogievetsky, 2010; Renger, Kolfschoten & De Vreede, 2008;
Rittgen, 2010; Yuille & Macdonald, 2010) and journal special issues (Prilla,
Nolte, Herrmann, Kolfschoten, & Lukosch, 2013; Rittgen, 2009, 2012).
Additionally, there are various parallel approaches in related research
communities such as Group Decision Support, Business Process Management and
Group Support Systems.
However, despite the fact that modeling is a popular approach in practice and
thus, many models exist in organizations, they are only used by a minority of the
people. This consequently leads to them only playing a minor role in everyday
work of the employees of an organization. This is quite surprising considering the
fact that models have proven to be very useful for cooperative work, especially
1 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
2
In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop
on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)
when planning it. Furthermore, the number of people creating models stands in
stark contrast to the number of people that are actually affected by planning based
on these models. Even if they are created collaboratively by process stakeholders,
they often have little impact on the people that are actually working in these
processes (cf. Prilla, 2010) and thus do not transcend into work practice. The
reasons for this are manifold. First, there are few insights on how to spread
models and sustain their usage in organizations thus coupling them with activities
and artifacts of everyday work. This explicitly includes a lack of knowledge about
factors that might motivate or hinder model usage and development. Furthermore,
up to now, little is known about how people interact with models that are no
modeling experts. By interaction of these non-expert users, we not only refer to
model creation, but also their usage in people’s daily work for e.g. discussion,
knowledge elicitation and creating a common understanding. Non-expert
interaction with them however proves to be an issue, as people that are involved
in processes usually are no modeling experts. Interaction in this context includes
enabling people to use modeling languages and thus to directly contribute to
model development, as well as providing other means such as textual or visual
annotations to enable indirect contributions. This leads to the question of how
models can be coupled with other artifacts of everyday work, which might prove
to be beneficial for their usage and ultimately increase their impact.
Besides the usage of models by non-experts, there is an additional research gap
in the collaborative construction of visual representations. Usually, the creation
and modification of models is restricted to collocated workshops and similar
modes of interaction and collaboration, where experts are required to facilitate
and support the modeling process. Despite their applicability and feasibility in
many situations, these workshops simply do not fit the need to rapidly adjust
processes to changing conditions inside and outside an organization. Given the
distributed nature of many organizations, these workshops also do not sufficiently
reflect the need to include expertise distributed across different locations.
Therefore, finding ways to enable dislocated users to contribute actively to model
creation and maintenance in a collaborative modeling process is necessary.
Given the increasing usage of visual representations in organizations, their
collaborative and distributed use, creation and sustainment is of vital interest for
the CSCW community, which has a long tradition of researching the usage of
common artifacts, the influence on collaboration by artifacts and their
collaborative creation. This workshop therefore aims at being a starting point in
forming a community for research in this area.
It is a follow up to a workshop on “'Collaborative usage and development of
models and visualization” which was held at ECSCW 2011 in Aarhus.
Proceedings of which can be found online at http://ftp.informatik.rwth-
aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-777/. Selected papers from the workshop
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In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop
on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)
will also be published in a special issue of the International Journal for
eCollaboration (Prilla et al., 2013).
Scope and aim of MoRoCo
The goal of MoRoCo is to bring together researchers, lecturers and practitioners
from different fields, who are interested in the collaborative usage and
development and maintenance of structured visual representations such as process
models, conceptual models or mind maps. This includes experiences from
empirical case studies, teaching and the introduction of models and modeling into
organizations. The workshop aims at building a large picture of research on the
role that models play in collaborative work in order to set up a common research
agenda. The topics of the workshop thus include but are not restricted to:
The process of cooperative modeling: design cycles, model negotiation, view
integration, roles of participants in modeling, team organization, etc.
Sustaining model usage and maintenance in organizations
Motivating involvement and active usage of models
Involving non-experts in model development and usage
Increasing the range of involvement: from core stakeholders to all stakeholders
Coupling models with activities and entities of work
Roles of models for collaboration e.g. guides / maps
Models as instruments for consensus building
The role of models in spanning inter or intra organizational boundaries
Integrating visual modeling and model dialogues in natural language
“Meta”-modeling: structuring the dialogue around models
Access to models: Creating a model friendly cooperation environment
Alignment of different understandings about collaborative work during
modeling
Empirical evidence for positive effects of modeling and model use
The aim of MoRoCo is not to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of
different modeling notations. It rather puts strong emphasis in the role of models
in collaborative work including their collaborative development, collaborative
interaction with them as well as intertwining them with activities and artifacts of
everyday work.
Accepted papers
Eight papers have been accepted for the workshop after a thorough review by an
international program committee. These contributions reflect the broad scope of
the workshop in contributing to a variety of aspects in the area of how models
affect and are affected by collaboration.
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In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop
on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)
In their paper Cooperation on Models and Models for Cooperation Gross and
Beckmann take a theoretically based stance on collaborative model and model
usage by applying Goffman’s framework of social interaction to these tasks. From
this perspective, they derive support needs for collaborative model usage and
development.
Two papers approach the interplay of modeling and creativity and outline how
creative processes can be supported methodologically and technologically. In his
paper Facilitating and Prompting of collaborative Reflection Process Models
Thomas Herrmann and Kai-Uwe Loser report on an approach to support socially
distributed reflection of diagrammatic process models. They identify two
fundamental concepts for reflection support: identification of model parts that can
be reflected on in disjoint social groups and computer-supported prompting to
substitute the role of a facilitator when reflecting in multiple groups. The paper
offers examples of how these concepts could be implemented using the SeeMe
modeling language and the socio-technical walkthrough. Bartelt, Vogel and
Warnecke also aim at supporting the interplay between creativity and modeling
within their work on Collaborative Creativity: From Hand Drawn Sketches to
Formal Domain Specific Models and Back Again. They discuss Scribbler, a
system for collaborative creation of hand-drawn models and their transformation
to formal domain-specific models (e.g. based on EMF) using sketch recognition.
Their toolset provides support for adaptively recognizing freehand drawings of
models created by multiple users and transforming them to formal EMF-models
and back again for further processing. The toolset is designed for collaborative
operation and provides a set of features that support the traceability of the
development history of models.
Using models to support collaboration in organizational environment almost
always involves laymen modelers, i.e. people who are experts in their area of
work but have no experiences in creating models or working with them. The
challenge of involving these people in modeling processes is discussed in three
papers presented at the workshop. In his paper Towards Role-distributed
Collaborative Business Process Elicitation, Stefan Oppl describes an approach in
letting different roles (stakeholders) in a modeling project model the processes
separated from each other and how to get resulting models into a commonly
agreed on model. Hoppenbrouwers, Thijssen and Vogels discuss in
Operationalizing Dialogue Games for Collaborative Modeling, how dialogue
games can be used for collaborative modeling. They present a methodology and a
prototypical tool that support the process of structuring and guiding conversations
for modeling. The paper focusses on the procedural guidelines necessary to
implement a dialogue game for modeling and gives a good impression of how it
could be facilitated. The description of the support system gives an overview of
how facilitation could be aided by software. In Beyond Collaborative Model
Usage and Development – A Model Lifecycle Approach for Lay User Modeling,
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In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop
on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)
Nolte and Prilla discuss the foundations of collaborative modeling with laymen.
They propose that we need concepts to engage users without modeling
capabilities into self-directed, user-managed processes of using and working on
models. They also presents a corresponding model lifecycle as well as suitable
interaction and participation modes, using examples from their work on
integrating lay-users into model usage and development.
Empirical studies on the effects of applying collaborative modeling in practical
settings on the modeling process and outcome are rarely available so far. One
paper that will be presented at the workshop has approached this topic. In their
paper The Added Value of Collaborative Modeling for Legal Business Rule
Management van Stokkum, Heiner, Hoppenbrouwers and Mulder describe a case
where collaborative modeling is used within the area of legal modeling. Particular
emphasis lies on combining business rule management with collaborative
modeling in order to create a broader acceptance for new rules that are being
applied. The paper thus provides an interesting and novel environment for
collaborative modeling techniques.
Poppe, Recker, Johnson and Brown argue that distributed collaborative
modeling requires support for visual cues used in co-located collaboration. In
Using natural user-interfaces for collaborative process modelling in virtual
environments they present their approach based on a 3D virtual world to facilitate
remote collaborative process model creation and validation. However, the added
complexity of having to navigate a virtual environment and using an avatar for
communication makes it difficult for novice users. An improved version of a 3D
modeling tool is supposed to address these issues by providing natural user
interfaces for non-verbal communication, navigation and model manipulation.
Program committee
Christian Bartelt, Clausthal University of Technology, Germany
Eike Bernhard, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Sebastian Döweling, SAP Research Darmstadt, Germany
Benjamim Fonseca, UTAD / INESC TEC, Portugal
Stijn Hoppenbrouwers, HAN University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands
John Krogstie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Stephan Lukosch, TU Delft, Netherlands
Jan Mendling, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Hajo Reijers, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Etiënne Rouwette, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
Barbara Weber, University of Innsbruck, Austria
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In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop
on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)
References
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Brosch, Seidl, Wieland, Wimmer, and Langer, (2009): 'We can work it out:
Collaborative Conflict Resolution in Model Versioning', Proceedings of
the 11th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(ECSCW 2009) pp. 207–214, Springer.
Heer, Bostock, and Ogievetsky, (2010): 'A tour through the visualization zoo',
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Herrmann, and Nolte, (2010): 'The Integration of Collaborative Process Modeling
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In: Nolte, A., Prilla, M., Rittgen, P. and Oppl, S.: Proceedings of the International Workshop
on Models and their Role in Collaboration at the ECSCW 2013 (MoRoCo 2013)
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