The mission of the Collaborative Software Community Group is to provide a forum for experts in collaborative software and groupware for technical discussions, gathering use cases and requirements to align the existing formats, software, platforms, systems and technologies (e.g. wiki technology) with those used by the Open Web Platform. The goal is to ensure that the requirements of collaborative technology and groupware can be answered, when in scope, by the Recommendations published by W3C.
This group is chartered to publish documents when doing so can enhance collaborative technology and groupware. The goal is to cooperate with relevant groups and to publish documents to ensure that the requirements of the collaborative software and groupware community are met.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
Situations also arise in participation where there are conflicts of interest. The matters are often situational, contextual, per topic or issue, amidst the unfolding processes of political dialogue and civil discourse in communities.
As e-participation opportunities become increasingly available, new reasoning and curricula may be required to ensure that participants can recognize and reason independently about situations and situational ethical topics.
As e-participation is a democratic process, peer pressures, intimidations or coercions of e-participants could be unethical.
Situations arise in participation where participants’ employers or the industries of participants’ employers have interests in political discussions. In such situations, some participants might be concerned about getting into trouble at workplaces, which can be, situationally, a form of intimidation. The idea or impression that individuals might get into trouble at work if they speak their opinions can stifle free speech in communities.
Situational options to protect free speech include the first amendment, legal protections, labor unions, teachers’ unions and tenure systems.
Though the Web and collaborative software facilitate the convenience of asynchronous collaboration and virtual meetings, groups, in particular when residing in the same cities, can schedule the use of meeting rooms, presentation rooms and auditoriums.
Venues for meetings or events provide the people of various clubs, organizations and businesses with modern, professional and high-tech meetings rooms, presentation rooms and auditoriums. The architectural designs of buildings and the furniture, equipment and resources at venues can be explored while also considering the popular activities of the clubs, groups and organizations in regions; some venues might provide multipurpose rooms. The equipment available at venues for meetings include high-bandwidth wifi, presentation equipment, sound systems, video equipment for recording meetings, equipment for webcasting meetings, transcription services and equipment for videoconferencing.
New such venues may arise from public sector investments as well as from other models. There exist various economic models and system models for simultaneously interconnecting large numbers of groups with large numbers of venues. In some approaches, the categories of organizations or of events are pertinent as charitable, public service or participatory democratic organizations might find discounted or free venue accommodations.
Productivity and collaborative software for the scheduling of meetings at organizations, reserving transportation, rooms and equipment at organizations, can scale for city-scale and otherwise distributed groups. Productivity and collaborative software with city-scale and larger-scale meetings and event planning, scheduling and logistics support can greatly convenience groups in their browsing of and selection of venues for in-person meetings; such features can be built into productivity and collaborative software. Such software should include the capability for multiple groups or for multiple subgroups of groups to schedule rooms at multiple venues with videoconferencing equipment.
Software which conveniences the scheduling of venues for meetings or events can stimulate the economic markets for such venues as well as local economies. Such venues can bring customers to proximate local businesses such as cafes, taverns, restaurants and shopping. Such venues can be on mass transportation routes.
The protocols utilized by the software components for groups to schedule uses of transportation, meeting rooms and equipment are important standardization topics.
Ideas are broached pertaining to new and emerging uses of calendar, scheduling and tasks software in educational, business and community scenarios.
City governments can provide calendar services and location aware service discovery can ease configuration so that users can synchronize their calendars to show city government events and local e-participation opportunities. Envisioned is a toggle specifically for such events, as some applications have settings for the birthdays of contacts or for holidays.
The categories of events are as broad as uses of collaborative software and productivity software for e-participation.
Categories of events include opinion polls. Opinion polls might open at a time, close at a time and involve scheduling participation with estimated duration. The heuristics might resemble scheduling appointments with virtual pollsters; users could observe opinion poll intervals on their calendars to then schedule participation as they might schedule appointments.
Location aware calendar-related services also include community calendars as well as event calendars provided by local newspapers.
Educational technology empowers educational systems, businesses, organizations and communities. Technology can provide users with task-based content, advancing productivity, as well as with information in response to their questions, to refresh their knowledge or to facilitate on-the-job training.
There is a cross-fertilization between business and e-participation scenarios. Software tools and features for organizational communication, organizational learning, knowledge management and on-the-job training are of use for e-participation scenarios. Businesses and enterprises are interested in training new employees and providing on-the-job training to all employees. In city-scale e-participation scenarios, new participants arrive regularly and all participants can find opportunities to learn amidst the various, dynamic, tasks and discussions of participatory democracy.
Educational technology tasks pertinent to e-participation include: (1) the instructional design of training programs pertaining to participatory democracy and to city governance, (2) facilitating the authoring of user-generated learning objects, (3) advancing learning objects and learning object metadata, (4) advancing the indexing, search and retrieval of learning objects and the federated search of learning objects, (5) advancing generative learning objects, case-based reasoning and machine learning.
A recent office software feature is that of “insights” or “smart lookup”. Expanding upon such features, computational linguistics algorithms upon documents or multimedia can produce varieties of metadata (i.e. about lexemes, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or overlapping regions or selections). Such metadata, with software such as Office Graph or other task-based contexts, can facilitate the utilization of expanded search API’s, including those of desktop search, search engines and federated search, to increase the quality of search results and to provide search results that include learning objects.
Users can schedule the utilization of learning objects conveniently from task-based contexts with interoperable calendar, scheduling and tasks applications.
Such technology advancements empower educational systems, businesses, organizations and communities. Such technology advancements scale to facilitate the performance of intelligent tutoring systems, digital personal assistants and digital group assistants in task-based mixed-initiative dialogues with users, in response to their questions, to refresh their knowledge or to facilitate on-the-job training.
Collaborative and productivity software are the software of city-scale e-participation.
Collaboration and productivity software empower individuals and teams in the performance of their various tasks at organizations across sectors and can facilitate various models of city-scale e-participation.
AceProject, web-based collaboration software for project management
Adobe Acrobat, gives synchronous and asynchronous review of PDFs
Adobe LiveCycle, a SOA Java EE server software product used to build applications that automate a broad range of business processes for enterprises and government agencies
AirSet, web and mobile online group coordination, collaboration, and communications suite.
Alfresco, a free/libre enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems.
Altova MetaTeam, collaborative decision-making, team performance management and project management software
Asana, a web and mobile application designed to improve the way teams communicate and collaborate
Assembla, a set of cloud-based task and code management tools for software developers
Pidoco, cloud-based collaboration tool to create, share, test website and mobile app UI prototypes
Pivotal Tracker, screen sharing capabilities to increase collaboration in meetings
Planbox, web-based agile project management tool with team collaboration features: comments, file sharing, feedback management
Podio, web based collaborative platform with workspaces, tasks per community members and app market
Pristine, video collaboration software for smart mobile devices, and smartglasses
Project.net Open Source Project Management software with document, task, and project sharing and collaboration
Projectplace, online collaboration tool providing Project management, Document collaboration & Communication in one tool
ProjectManager.com online project management software with collaboration features for teams
ProjectWise, a suite of project information management and collaboration software and services from Bentley Systems designed for the architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) industries and infrastructure owner-operators.
ProtoShare, web-based collaborative prototyping and review tool for interactive projects
Powermeeting, web-based synchronous groupware which allows users to conduct group activities in a well-coordinated group process
QikPad, web-based collaborative real time text-based tool
QuickBase, a low-code platform for building expressive, scalable, interoperable applications for organizations of all sizes, without compromising IT governance and controls.
RelateIQ, web-based relationship intelligence platform that enables teams to track, share, and analyze shared relationships
Retroshare, an open-source cross-platform, friend-2-friend and secure decentralised communication platform