In today’s volatile business environments, collaboration between information systems, both within and across company borders, has become essential to success. An efficient supply chain, for example, requires the collaboration of distributed and heterogeneous systems of multiple companies. Developing such collaborative applications and building the supporting information systems poses several engineering challenges. A key challenge is to manage the ever growing design complexity. In this article, we argue that software architecture should play a more prominent role in the development of collaborative applications. This can help to better manage design complexity by modularizing collaborations and separating concerns. State of the art solutions, however, often lack proper abstractions for modeling collaborations at architectural level or do not reify these abstractions at detailed design and implementation level. Developers, on the other hand, rely on middleware, business process management, and Web services, techniques that mainly focus on low-level infrastructure. To address the problem of managing the design complexity of collaborative applications, we present Macodo. Macodo consists of three complementary parts: (1) a set of abstractions for modeling adaptive collaborations, (2) a set of architectural views, the main contribution of this article, that reify these abstractions at architectural level, and (3) a proof of concept middleware infrastructure that supports the architectural abstractions at design and implementation level. We evaluate the architectural views in a controlled experiment. Results show that the use of Macodo can reduce fault density and design complexity, and improve reuse and productivity. The main contributions of this article are illustrated in a supply chain management case.

Social networks have been evolving over the past few years, leading to a rapid increase in the number and complexity of relationships among their entities. In this research, we focus on a large scale dataset known as the Digital Bibliography and Library Project or DBLP, which contains information on all publications that have been published in computer and information science related journals and conference proceedings. We model the DBLP dataset as a social network of research collaborations. DBLP is a structured and dynamic dataset stored in the XML file format; it contains over 850,000 authors and 2 million publications, and the resulting collaboration social network is a scale-free network. We define DBLP collaboration social network as a graph that consists of researchers as nodes and links representing the collaboration or co-authorship relationships among the researchers. In this work, we implement a data analysis algorithm called Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) to represent the degree of collaboration among the DBLP authors as Euclidean distances in 2-dimensional space in order to analyze, mine and understand the relational information in this large scale network in a visual way. MDS is a useful technique for data visualization and graph drawing methods, but it has high computational complexity for large scale graphs such as the DBLP graph. Therefore, we propose different solutions to overcome this problem, and improve the MDS performance. In addition, as the quality of the MDS result is measured by a metric known as the stress value, we use the steepest descent method to minimize the stress in an iterative process called stress optimization in order to generate the best geometric layout of the graph nodes in 2-dimensional space. We also propose a solution to further enhance the graph visualization by partitioning the graph into sub-graphs and using repelling forces among nodes within the same sub-graph. Finally, we developed a new visualization tool that can handle the large scale of the DBLP graph, and provides the user a number of significant features that allow them to explore, navigate and sift for information through the graph, such as graph scaling and graphical search functionality. / UOIT

While service and support delivery for youth and families has been a priority within education in Saskatchewan for the past thirty years, educators and schools struggle to respond to the changing and often complex needs of students and families today.<p> The primary purpose of this study was to formulate a conceptual framework to explore the construct of social capital and the variables affecting social capital creation, acquisition and mobility. My secondary purpose was to then use network inquiry to investigate how networks of relations in a school community could be invested in and utilized to increase sources of social capital in an educational context for educators, students and families. As both an interpretive qualitative study and a critical qualitative study, this dissertation used focus groups to explore the experiences and sense-making of 16 participants in an educational setting to answer questions regarding social capital.<p> Having used network inquiry to investigate existing levels of social capital in a school community and the opportunities for social capital growth, the findings affirm the potential of network inquiry to contribute to the discourse on service delivery in schools. Furthermore, by identifying the academic and non-academic variables that contributed to successful collaborative partnerships and the determinants for increased capacity, process is emphasized before outcome, which holds potential for promising practices. Finally, because this study was conducted in an educational context, this may help policy makers to provide a framework to investigate processes for optimum service delivery and to frame educational policies for improved outcomes for youth and families.

This thesis investigates the hypothesis that creative social entrepreneurs facilitate collaborative governance in the Saskatoon city-region by being the primary creators of social capital. Governance, both its quality and form, is essential in facilitating social, cultural, and economic development at the city-region level. Collaborative governance is a form of governance that enables a community to mobilize all of its assets (individuals, associations, and institutions) in all sectors of society (industry, government, and civil society) to address issues of need and to create new growth. The quality of governance at the city-region level is directly influenced by the level of social capital in the city-region. It is widely acknowledged that members of Richard Floridas creative class drive Promethean-like economic development. However, the creative class is not monolithic; members of the creative class can choose to be involved in society in many different ways. The benefits that members of the creative class can have on a society when they act socially have been largely ignored in the literature. Creative social entrepreneurs characterized by their creativity, horizontal hypermobility, preference for involvement in participatory activities, and desire for quasi-anonymity (weak ties)facilitate the governance of society by creating social capital (societal level social capital, associational level social capital, and individual level social capital). The thesis presents and analyses the output from a survey of 30 creative social entrepreneurs from government, business, civil society, and the university in the Saskatoon city-region. This survey was used to measure the level of creativity (professional and informal creativity) and entrepreneurial capacity of the participants, as well as map their social networks. Using social networks analysis (SNA) three measures of centrality (closeness centrality, betweens centrality, and eigenvector centrality) were used to examine the impact that creative social entrepreneurs play in social capital creation. The results from this analysis did not explicitly support the hypothesis that creative social entrepreneurs play a key role in social capital creation and the facilitation of governance at the city-region level. However, there was a positive correlation between professional creativity and all three measures of centrality. Not all innovators impact social capital creation. However, those professional innovators that do act socially are positioned in community networks to be the primary creators of social capital.

This paper presents a case for the expansion of a commuting system called casual carpool. The system is a grassroots network of carpoolers that collaborate to form rideshare for their commute to the downtown areas of San Francisco, Houston and Washington DC. Through the author’s experience with the system and personal attempts to deliver a rideshare network to the public, a framework of a greater casual carpool organization is presented.

La conception amont de produits mécaniques est, à l'heure actuelle, peu outillée en logiciels (Mougenot 2008), et en particulier en structure collaborative support de l'activité des concepteurs. Cependant, elle fige à elle seule près de 80% des coûts futurs du projet (Michaels and Wood 1989). Dans ce contexte, notre recherche propose un modèle de définition d'un environnement collaboratif amont, à destination des entreprises. Elle s'appuie sur la mise en œuvre d'un protocole expérimental à base d'entretiens réalisés auprès d'utilisateurs finaux au sein d'entreprises. Cette démarche nous a permis de décrire l'activité de conception amont dans des secteurs industriels variés et de montrer que le développement et l'optimisation d'un environnement collaboratif amont reposent principalement sur des représentations intermédiaires (RI) de type "image". Il a été montré que l'identification et la numérisation des RI sont des préalables nécessaires à la définition de cet environnement, et que certaines contraintes métiers peuvent également être supportées par ces RI. Le modèle qui en découle permet de formuler des spécifications pour le développement d'un outil logiciel d'aide à la conception d'environnements collaboratifs, intégré dans un environnement PLM en conception mécanique.

This is a qualitative study based on interviews with professionals who are cooperating at a children advocacy center, in swedish called “Barnahus”. The center, Barnahus, pulls together law enforcement, criminal justice, child protective service, medical and mental health workers in to one coordinated team. Children suspected to be victims of any kind of violence or sexual abuse shall, at Barnahus, be offered coordinated efforts and support all the way from suspicion to possible intervention.   The aim of the study is to examine how the participants involved relate to collaboration in Barnahus. The study will also present the success factors and barriers to collaboration that identifies by the participating actors, who are mentioned above. The study will provide insight and understanding of how collaboration can be represented in multiprofessional activities in practice.

La complexité est au premier rang des défis en gestion de projet. Un outil de collaboration issu des technologies du Web 2.0 appelé "wiki" offre de nouvelles pistes de réponses à cette problématique. L'objectif principal de cette recherche est de montrer comment le wiki peut nous aider à composer avec la complexité en gestion de projet. Plus précisément, il s'agit de s'appuyer sur les tremplins de la systémique et de la complexité pour proposer une modélisation du système wiki avant de tenter de le légitimer à partir de données recueillies sur le terrain. Pour ce faire, une étude de cas a été réalisée sur une période de cinq mois auprès d'une entreprise oeuvrant dans le secteur des télécommunications. Celle-ci a mis en place un wiki pilote pour servir de plateforme de collaboration au développement d'un logiciel de test interne. Cette recherche constructiviste, suit une approche exploratoire. Son cadre conceptuel se fonde sur une revue des notions théoriques dans les domaines de la systémique, de la complexité et du wiki. Sont explorés notamment les trois principes morinniens de la dialogique, de la récursion et de l'hologramme. La collecte des données s'est faite à partir d'entrevues préliminaires, d'un sondage intermédiaire, de documents internes et d'une observation directe participative. En définitive, cette recherche devrait apporter des contributions tant conceptuelles que managériales à la problématique de la complexité en gestion de projet. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Complexité, Gestion de projet, Systémique, Hologramme, Récursion, Dialogique, Wiki, Technologie, Web 2.0, Collaboration.

Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) carriers generally serve geographical regions that are more localized than the inter-city routes served by truckload carriers. That localization can lead to urban freight transportation routes that overlap. If trucks are traveling with less than full loads there may exist opportunities for carriers to collaborate over such routes. That is, Carrier A will also deliver one or more shipments of Carrier B. This will improve vehicle asset utilization and reduce asset-repositioning costs, and may also lead to reduced congestion and pollution in cities. We refer to the above coordination as “collaborative routing”. In our framework for collaboration, we also propose that carriers exchange goods at logistics platforms located at the entry point to a city. This is referred to as “entry-point collaboration”. One difficulty in collaboration is the lack of facilities to allow transfer of goods between carriers. We highlight that the reduction in pollution and congestion under our proposed framework will give the city government an incentive to support these initiatives by providing facilities. Further, our analysis has shown that contrary to the poor benefits reported by previous work on vehicle routing with transshipment, strategic location of transshipment facilities in urban areas may solve this problem and lead to large cost savings from transfer of loads between carriers. We also present a novel integrated three-phase solution method. Our first phase uses either a modified tabu search, or a guided local search, to solve the vehicle routing problems with time windows that result from entry-point collaboration. The preceding methods use a constraint programming engine for feasibility checks. The second phase uses a quad-tree search to locate facilities. Quad-tree search methods are popular in computer graphics, and for grid generation in fluid simulation. These methods are known to be efficient in partitioning a two-dimensional space for storage and computation. We use this efficiency to search a two-dimensional region and locate possible transshipment facilities. In phase three, we employ an integrated greedy local search method to build collaborative routes, using three new transshipment-specific moves for neighborhood definition. We utilize an optimization module within local search to combine multiple moves at each iteration, thereby taking efficient advantage of information from neighborhood exploration. Extensive computational tests are done on random data sets which represent a city such as Toronto. Sensitivity analysis is performed on important parameters to characterize the situations when collaboration will be beneficial. Overall results show that our proposal for collaboration leads to 12% and 15% decrease in route distance and time, respectively. Average asset utilization is seen to increase by about 5% as well.

This thesis focuses on college-aged second-generation Americans whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from India. The purpose of the study is to examine the ethnic and cultural identities of second-generation Indian Americans in the Atlanta area. This exploratory study is meant to interrogate cognitive boundaries to suggest that identity is not a fixed state but a fluid process that is continually shaped both by the individual and by society. I have amassed data through both video-recorded ethnographic interviews and self-video ethnography yielding visual ethnographic material that supplements the written thesis. During the research period, I posted regularly at www.kellyshonorsthesis.wordpress.com, providing updates on my progress with the research project. Through creating a visual project that is public from the very beginning, I have aimed to achieve transparency as a researcher and to increase visibility for the field of anthropology. In addition, I demonstrate that research collaboration using self-video ethnography can be an effective ethnographic method to give voice to research participants and to reveal nuances not otherwise accessible.