Collaboration as an Activity Coordinating with Pseudo-Collective Objects

A coalition is a collaborative pattern in which people must work together to accomplish a task, but where organizational constraints stand in the way of their making use of the coordination techniques that typically enable collaboration. Trinity is a software system that uses a virtual world to provide coalitions with synthetic coordination capabilities functionally equivalent to those that occur naturally in an organized collaboration. The virtual world functions as a pseudo-collective object since it plays the coordination role of a collective object. The design philosophy underlying Trinity is heavily informed by some of the fundamental concepts of Activity Theory. To illustrate these ideas, we will examine below the case of coordinating operational information for the coalition of people who maintain the stream of data coursing through a securities brokerage, describing along the way the relevant Activity Theory background and the architecture of the virtual world. 

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: CSCW
• Authors: David Zager
• Keywords: Activity Theory, CSCW 2002, Social Sciences, Synthetic Coordination Capabilities, Virtual World