A proposal to model collaborative work: The case study of a research network

In this paper, we describe our view for a successful collaboration in Virtual Manet, a distributed academic research network. It works as a test bed for an organized set of tools that could assist also distributed collaborative manufacturing. Our aim is to design, implement and experiment E-Manet, a software environment that supports both synchronous and asynchronous computer-supported scientific e-collaboration. The idea can be generalized to encompass the manufacturing business or a collaborative production in virtual enterprises. The first results of the experiment points to the need of a pro-active management of the collaborative system with several different levels of negotiators.