Supporting elastic collaboration: integration of collaboration components in dynamic contexts

In dynamic problem-solving situations, groups and organizations have to become more flexible to adapt collaborative workspaces according to their needs. New paradigms propose to bridge two opposing process and ad-hoc perspectives to achieve such flexibility. However, a key challenge relies on the dynamic integration of groupware tools in the same collaborative workspace. This paper proposes a collaborative workspace (Elgar) that supports the Elastic Collaboration concept, and a standard interface to realize the integration of groupware tools, named Elastic Collaboration Components. The paper illustrates the use of such flexible collaborative workspace and the use of groupware tools in a machine diagnosis scenario that requires collaboration.