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the collaboration engineer can assign questions
to respondents, and automatically mail them the
survey. Based on this information interviews and
sessions to design and validate the process can be
more efficiently organized and executed. Some of
the information that is to be analyzed is used as a
basis for the design effort or for the validation. In
this way the feedback from the user community
can be used to improve the design patterns.
3.
Based on a set of thinkLets that can use the
outcome of the previous thinkLet as input
(combination patterns).
4.
From a set of alternatives, this can be auto-
matically derived from the above classifi-
cations, allowing the user to choose among
alternatives with a similar result, or with a
similar pattern of collaboration.
ThinkLets can be classified among several
aspects (patterns of collaboration or results), so
the collaboration engineer should be able to select
an aspect on the list and thus narrow the set of
available thinkLets. During the selection process,
detailed information on the thinkLets should be
available to the collaboration engineer. For ex-
ample through a single click on the thinkLet, its
attributes relevant for selection should be visible.
We think of these selection methods as topics in
a topic map, where the classification term is the
topic, and the relations between thinkLets are the
associations, and the patterns in the library are the
occurrences (Techquila, 2007).
A specific combination of thinkLets will have
specific added value or risks. Such information
should be provided by the CACE tool as well
when a combination is tested. Information about
combinations is of course only valid when the
output of one thinkLet is used as input for the
next thinkLet. Further, a collaboration engineer
needs a functionality that enables him to compare
thinkLets on their applicability. Finally, thinkLets
can be modified to create small changes in the pat-
terns of collaboration they create or in the result
they create. Such modifications will also support
the collaboration engineer in selecting a thinkLet.
Therefore, the sequence builder and the choice
tool should allow the collaboration engineer to
select modifiers.
Besides a fit to the task and the existing thin-
kLet sequence, the choice of a thinkLet should
also be aligned with the available resources, the
group, and the practitioner. Key aspects in this
respect include (obviously, for some thinkLets
Process Sequence Builder
Based on the information in the analysis support
part of the CACE tool, a first set of constraints
to the process design should be available: for
example, the time frame for the collaboration
process execution is fixed, and some elements
like a lunch break, a introduction presentation etc.
are automatically scheduled. The next step in the
design effort is to create the sequence of activi-
ties. For this purpose, the collaboration engineer
adds and labels the activities in the collaboration
process such as “brainstorm ideas”, “select key
ideas”, etc. After such a sequence of activities is
created the collaboration engineer can start choos-
ing and importing thinkLets using a choice tool.
Some more experienced collaboration engineers
“think in terms of thinkLets” meaning that they
want to directly select thinkLets into the process.
Furthermore, the selection of a specific thinkLet
will sometimes change the sequence of activities,
therefore activities should be visualized as a kind
of placeholders, that can be replaced by one or
more thinkLets. By default, the thinkLet should
take on the activity name of the sequence. A col-
laboration engineer can import thinkLets into the
process sequence, and can be supported in different
ways to select a thinkLets, for example:
1.
From an alphabetical list and from a list in
which the thinkLet pictures are visualized.
2.
Based on classifications of the patterns of col-
laboration or the results of the thinkLet.
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