Collaborators

This research is done in collaboration with (international) colleagues interested in Creativity and Information Technology. On this page our colleagues present their interests and contribution to the project.

Information and Technology Management, Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Herrmann
Website: http://www.imtm-iaw.rub.de

Interests in the Research

The research group Information- and Technology-Management (IMTM) at the University of Bochum uses socio-technical environments for the creative design of socio-technical solutions. Therefore it combines co-located meeting support for heterogeneous teams with knowledge management environments which connects a series of design workshops.
With this combination of co-located meeting support and knowledge management, our work is closely related to the tasks further development of a Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory and exploring and assessing social and technical components in support of reflective communities.
We are highly interested to contribute to the project by:
• Exchanging the documentation of our research results (also drafts) and recordings of empirical data
• Taking part in detailed discussions via chat or video-conferencing
• Sending phd-students or research assistants whose salary is paid by the university of Bochum to Boulder for three months or more.

Contributions

So far we have been discussing ideas and concepts related to the research on Next Generation Wikis and joined the community wiki provided by the L3D. We have also started to send PhD students to the L3D to actively take part in the work on the project:
Michael Prilla stayed at the L3D from October to December 2007. He works on the integration and manipulation of complex content such as process maps and mind maps into collaborative environments like wikis and other knowledge management applications. His main objective is to make these content types as valuable for these applications as text already is. For his work, he uses an approach based on social tagging mechanisms known from current web 2.0 applications. During his visit at the L3D he discussed his work and its overlay with the New Generation Wiki project. From this, several ideas such as integrating and manipulating process maps into the wiki and using tags to derive relationships between community members were developed. We plan to use this as a starting point for further collaboration, including implementing the ideas mentioned.