Designing Effective Group Report Authoring Support Systems (GRASS)

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Aldo de Moor, from Vrije Universiteit Brussel on "The systems design philosohy of GRASS"


Designing Effective Group Report Authoring Systems

Virtual adversarial collaborative communities play an increasingly important role in the resolution of wicked societal problems. To operate effectively, these communities require different communication technologies, like tools supporting group report authoring processes. Often, the focus is on designing isolated tools, optimized from particular communication perspectives, such as argumentation or negotiation theory. If technological support is to be effective, however, a systems design perspective is also needed, taking into account multiple technologies, stakeholder requirements, and contexts of use. The systems design philosophy of GRASS (Group Report Authoring Support System) is outlined. Some findings on an experiment in which GRASS played an essential role as part of a comprehensive community communication system are presented.

Date & Time: Tuesday 17th May 2005, 14:00pm Venue: Room 104, 24 University Square, Queen's University Belfast

Aldo de Moor

Aldo de Moor (ademoor@vub.ac.be) is a senior researcher at STARLab (Semantics Technology and Applications Laboratory), Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He got his Ph.D. in Information Management from Tilburg University, the Netherlands. From 1999-2004, he was an assistant professor at Infolab, Dept. of Information Systems and Management, Tilburg University. Aldo's research interests include the evolution of virtual communities, communicative workflow modeling, argumentation technologies, Language/Action theory, conceptual graph theory, and ontology-guided meaning negotiation. Aldo has been a visiting researcher at the University of Guelph, Canada, and the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He has been involved in many projects, including the development of a group report authoring support system, a business negotiation support system, and a knowledge management measurement approach.