PROCESS-ORIENTED COORDINATION OF
COLLABORATIONS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS
Agnes Koschmider, Andreas Oberweis and Huayu Zhang
Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Kaiserstrasse 89, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
Keywords: Processes, Collaboration, Community, Social Networks, Modeling.
Abstract: Social networks are known to stimulate the exchange and sharing of information among peers. Even more
social networks can initiate a cooperation (e.g., people sharing music) and a collaboration (e.g., searching
for collaborators for research works). However, social networks are not widely used as work resources (e.g.,
for help or support request) mostly due to missing coordination mechanisms. This paper describes how col-
laboration can be coordinated in social networks. The proposed way to achieve this is based on the usage of
a set of activity lists of social network members. An activity list specifies all personal activities required to
reach a collaborative output. Based on the activity lists a process model can be generated that controls and
analyzes the coordination. Activities requiring collaboration are performed using social network. The ap-
proach is illustrated with a use case.
1 INTRODUCTION
Social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Lin-
kedIn and XING have attracted millions of users
over the past few years. The platforms are mainly
used for private purposes such as the initiation and
maintenance of personal contacts, but also for busi-
ness purposes, for example, job placement or mar-
keting.
Although there are functionalities available in
social networks for (research) collaboration (e.g.,
entry of interests), social networks are not widely
used as work resources (e.g., for help or support
requests). One reason for this is an insufficient coor-
dination support for collaborations. Ineffective
communication mechanisms in social networks also
hamper the activation of collaboration (e.g., there is
no support for analysis of interpersonal relation-
ships). Particularly, there is a lack of coordination of
geographically distributed collaboration among dif-
ferent organizations (e.g., writing an EU proposal)
where geographical, language or technical barriers
exist. Coordination mechanisms can be used to ana-
lyze the existing relationships, help to overcome
communication barriers regarding the output of col-
laboration and may efficiently organize collaborative
activities.
Let the following scenario be given as shown in
Figure 1. Member B1 from the social network on the
right hand side intends to write a research paper
(preferably with people of complementary know-
ledge). New in the department, she is not aware of
the paper writing process. Assume a source is given
that describes the writing process (e.g., a wiki page)
or the user specifies by herself the activities required
to write the paper. Based on this source, respectively
activity list, a process model is generated including
her own activities. Some of these activities might
require collaborators who can be found in social
networks, for example, the collaborators A3 and B9.
Subsequently, the initial process model of B1 can be
extended with activities of these two collaborators.
Figure 1: Coordinating the paper writing process.
361
Koschmider A., Oberweis A. and Zhang H.
PROCESS-ORIENTED COORDINATION OF COLLABORATIONS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS.
DOI: 10.5220/0002855703610366
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology (WEBIST 2010), page
ISBN: 978-989-674-025-2
Copyright
c
2010 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
This paper describes a model for the coordina-
tion of collaborations in social networks. Particular-
ly, the focus lies on geographically distributed colla-
borations, which are difficult to handle. The ap-
proach presented in this paper can be used to en-
hance existing social networks supporting the coor-
dination of (research) collaborations.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 de-
scribes the properties of geographically distributed
research collaborations in social networks and the
activities to be coordinated. Section 3 provides a
process-oriented approach to coordinate such colla-
borations. The modeling process is explained in Sec-
tion 4. The approach is illustrated with a use case in
Section 5. Related work is discussed in Section 6.
The paper concludes with a summary and an outlook
on future research in Section 7.
2 RESEARCH COLLABORATION
IN SOCIAL NETWORKS
2.1 Fundamentals of Social Networks
A social network is a network whose nodes are so-
cial actors (individuals or groups) and whose edges
represent the relationships of actors to each other
(Barnes, 1972). This paper will refer to research
collaborations in online social networks where social
actors (network members) are research groups,
scientists, technical staff, doctoral or postdoctoral
researchers. Each edge is weighted with a positive
value, which indicates the frequency of communica-
tion between two network members. Collaboration
starts in a social network as soon as the first two
stages of network development (Potential and Coa-
lescing, see Figure 2) are completed. After reaching
the end of the third stage (Active) the network mem-
bers stay only occasionally in contact. Figure 2 also
provides an overview about the activities of each
stage, to which we will refer in the following sec-
tions.
2.2 Properties of Geographically
Distributed Research
Collaborations
A collaboration can be described with the following
four properties (Schramm-Klein, 2005): direction of
collaboration (vertical, horizontal, lateral), number
of partners (bilateral, multilateral), formalization of
collaboration ("strong ties", "weak ties") and bind-
ing intensity (formal, informal collaboration). In
Figure 2: Stages of social network development (Wenger,
1998).
addition to these properties, a research collaboration
can be characterized by the type of collaboration:
Reading and writing: The collaboration artefact
is a result of a knowledge creation process, such
as a model, a project proposal or program code.
Organizational: The collaboration artefact is a
result of an organizational process, such as a
joint workshop or a business trip.
In this paper a geographically distributed re-
search collaboration in social networks is considered
as a not by contract regulated teamwork performed
on the two types of collaboration. We assume that
two or more network members are involved in the
collaboration, who have weak relationships with
each other. These network members have either the
same or complementary research interests.
To support a collaboration according to the so-
cial network development, different activities in the
first three development stages should be coordinated
with respect to the above-mentioned properties. Ta-
ble 1 summarizes the corresponding activities.
Table 1: Summary of activities and collaboration proper-
ties for each development stage.
Stage Activity to be carried out Property
Potential Finding partners horizontal
vertical
bilateral
multilateral
Coalescing Building relationship (estab-
lishment of contacts and
communication), specifying
collaboration outputs
bilateral
multilateral
informal
„weak ties“
Active Executing collaboration
(e.g. writing a publication,
joint assessment of a pro-
posal, development of a
prototype and organisation
of a joint workshop)
bilateral
multilateral
informal
„weak ties“
reading and
writing
organizational
WEBIST 2010 - 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
362
3 MODEL FOR COORDINATION
OF COLLABORATION IN
SOCIAL NETWORKS
To coordinate a research collaboration in social net-
works a process-oriented approach has been chosen.
The advantage of this approach is a controlled coor-
dination and analysis of the collaboration. In the
following we will define a model that includes all
activities of social network members in order to
reach a collaboration output. The model supports the
consultation of a social network in case of a collabo-
ration. The process model that is generated based on
the activity list of a social network member is called
a “Community Process”.
The Community Process (CP) is a set of related
activities of network members that are executed to
achieve a collaboration output. The activities of a
Community Process are either Single Activities or
Collaborative Activities. In a Single Activity only
one or no network member is involved. In a Colla-
borative Activity at least two network members are
involved that are connected based on an explicit
collaborative relationship. Social networks are used
to implement Collaborative Activities, which de-
scribe the involvement of network members in social
production (Benkler, 2006). The activities are per-
formed sequentially, in parallel, iteratively or alter-
natively. Each Community Process has exactly one
start and one end activity. A Community Process can
be decomposed into several sub-processes and has at
least one Collaborative Activity that refines a se-
quential sequence of sub-processes Finding Part-
ners, Building Relationship and Collaboration Ex-
ecution. Examples of a Community Process are "col-
laboration in an EU proposal", " collaboration in the
organization of a workshop" and "idea generation
process". Another example of a Community Process
will be discussed in detail in Section 5.
A Community Process is associated with a set of
process resources that are designated as Community
Process Objects. A Community Process Object is
either a Flowing Object or a Non-flowing Object.
The Flowing Object includes all information and
data that will be transferred from one activity to
another so that an activity can be performed. The
Non-flowing Object includes those resources that
execute the activity.
A special Non-flowing Object is Community Us-
er (CU) that describes exactly one network member
through a user profile. A Community User has rela-
tionships to other Community Users. From these
relationships the network structure can be derived. A
user profile contains information about e.g., contact
information, knowledge, experience and interests. A
friendship and/or a relationship of knowledge may
exist between two Community Users.
A type of Flowing Object is Community Content
(CC) that is a container for a time, place or event-
limited context. Examples of Community Content
for research collaborations are "publication", "re-
search project application", "workshop" and "confe-
rence".
The collaboration will be coordinated by specify-
ing a Community Process of a network member,
especially its Collaborative Activities, and assign-
ment of Community Process Objects to the process.
To graphically describe a Community Process,
an extension of Petri nets (Reisig, 1986) is used.
Petri nets are well known and are well suited for
modeling, analyzing and verifying process and data
flows. However, additional graphical elements are
required to describe human-centric activities espe-
cially communication behavior such as the behavior
in a Community Process. The graphical symbols of
the notation are listed in Table 2.
Table 2: Notation for Community Process modeling.
Symbol Description Meaning / Remarks
place Temporary storage for
Flowing Objects
transition Single Activity
directed arc Arcs running from a place to
a transition or vice versa
label Collaborative relationship;
A Collaborative Activity is
identified by a label on a
transition.
F-block Representation of an ab-
stract Finding Partner sub-
process
B-block Representation of an ab-
stract Building Relationship
sub-process
C-block Representation of an ab-
stract Collaboration Execu-
tion sub-process
block
arc
Block arc runing from F-
block to B-block or from B-
block to C-block
connection Assignment of a Communi-
ty User to a Single Activity;
connections may only exist
between unlabeled transi-
tions and members
member Representation of a Com-
munity User with a name
Besides these graphical extensions, a special re-
finement rule must be applied to labeled transitions
(Collaborative Activities) that is defined as follows.
In case of refinement of a labeled transition a se-
PROCESS-ORIENTED COORDINATION OF COLLABORATIONS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS
363
quence of F-block, B-block and C-block will be
created.
Figure 3 shows an example of a simple Commu-
nity Process that involves two network members
(with Name1 and Name2). Collaboration starts with
the Collaborative Activity CA.
Figure 3: Coordination of a research collaboration using a
Community Process.
For the modeling of Community Process Objects
UML class diagrams are used here. Figure 4 shows
the structure of the Community Process Object.
Figure 4: Structure of Community Process Object.
4 THE PROCESS OF MODELING
This section describes the process of modeling a
Community Process. The modeling process consists
of five steps.
1 First, Community Users have to be obtained
from e.g., the analysis of data from "event logs"
(van der Aalst and Song, 2004) or e-mails from
information and communication systems (Ya-
makami, 1998). Alternatively, user data from
existing social networks such as Facebook or
XING can beused. Based on the user’s relation-
ships the structure of the network can be
represented with a Sociogram given by Social
Network Analysis (Wasserman and Faust,
1994). Subsequently, statistical analysis me-
thods of the network structure can be used to de-
termine some important metrics for collabora-
tion such as centrality (a network member has a
lot of relationships to other network members),
indegree/outdegree (number of incom-
ing/outgoing connections in the role of reques-
tor and responder) and transitivity (two network
members who are both connected to a given
network member can be considered as directly
connected). These metrics are suitable to filter
contact persons or collaboration partners.
2 In the next step, all data objects describing
Community Content have to be specified such
as publication, collaboration agreement and ap-
pointment.
3 Generation of the Community Process based on
an activity list of a network member starting
from the first abstraction level. (Dengler et al.,
2009) suggested an approach how to automati-
cally generate a process model based on wiki
pages describing activities of an organizational
process.
4 Assignment of data objects from Community
Content to places and if necessary assignment of
Community Users to Single Activities.
5 Refinement of the Community Process using the
elements presented in Table 2 and modeling
more concretely the abstract Finding Partners,
Building Relationship and Collaboration Execu-
tion sub-processes.
The modeling steps 4-5, and possibly steps 1 and
2 are to be repeated until all Collaborative Activities
are defined and the Community Process is described
accurately enough.
5 USE CASE
In this Section, a use case of a Community Process
for the coordination of research collaboration will be
presented. The corresponding process on “collabora-
tion on writing a scientific paper” can be found in
(Klink et al., 2006). Figure 5 shows an example of
the network structure after the Community Process
Objects have been modeled. Note that this figure
shows only some of the edges with weights (com-
munication frequency of peers).
WEBIST 2010 - 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
364
Figure 6: Creation of a Community Process model.
Figure 5: The network structure before the execution of
collaboration.
The next step is the generation of the first abstrac-
tion level of the Community Process. Subsequently,
the modeling steps 4-5, as explained in Section 4,
and possibly also steps 1 and 2 must be repeated. A
network member can either model the activities by
himself or use a modeling support tool
(Hornung et
al., 2008)
. The process will be modeled top-down.
Figure 6 shows the simplified Community Process.
In the execution period of the Community
Process, the communication details among the net-
work members (for example, A1, A6, A8, B1, C1
and C2), such as communication duration, frequency
and media will be collected and then analyzed as
mentioned in Section 4. Figure 7 shows an example
of the network structure at the end of the collabora-
tion. The structure includes some new relationships
(e.g., between B1 and C1 and C2) and arcs with in-
creased weights due to collaborative activities.
Figure 7: The network structure after the execution of
collaboration.
6 RELATED WORK
Related work can be found in three areas: (1) com-
bination of process modeling with social networks,
(2) Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
and (3) eCollaboration approaches for supporting
scientific research.
In (Hornung et al., 2008) a recommendation-
based modeling support system for business
processes is described. To support the selection of
appropriate process models social networks are used
(Koschmider et al., 2009). (Khalaf et al., 2009) and
(Silva et al., 2009) are not using a recommendation
system based on social networks, but use social net-
works for an active exchange of process patterns.
The approaches above could be adapted in the mod-
eling of Community Processes in order to capture
target-specific process fragments.
PROCESS-ORIENTED COORDINATION OF COLLABORATIONS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS
365
Approaches in the areas of CSCW and eCollabo-
ration focus on the use of information and commu-
nication technologies to support collaboration. For
example in (Lubich, 1995), a CSCW framework for
scientific collaborations in Europe was described.
(Harrer et al., 2007) describes an approach in eCol-
laboration enabling researchers to detect interaction
patterns by utilizing logfiles of user actions captured
by system. (Luzón, 2009) considers the possibility of
using academic weblogs as tools for eCollaboration
to enable better communication among researchers.
The main innovation of the presented approach, in
contrast to the results from CSCW and eCollabora-
tion, is the flexibility and extensibility of the coordi-
nation of collaborations in social networks.
7 CONCLUSIONS AND
OUTLOOK
This paper proposes a process-oriented model for the
coordination of research collaborations in social
networks. Other available process-oriented ap-
proaches do not take into account the network (rela-
tionship) development appropriately, so that the
coordination of collaboration cannot take place effi-
ciently.
Coordination on the basis of the network devel-
opment in combination with Social Network Analy-
sis has the advantage that the activities and human
resources can be applied in an easier and more tar-
geted way for the initiation and execution of a colla-
boration. To organize collaboration the concept of
Community Process was introduced, which coordi-
nates both the individual and collaborative activities
of network members. The collaboration can be ef-
fectively controlled by a network member through a
Community Process because the communication
behavior with partners and the status of execution
are transparent.
Next steps of this work include the formalization
of all concepts of the Community Process in order to
obtain a system-supported execution of Community
Processes. An evaluation will be conducted investi-
gating the system's effectiveness and usability.
REFERENCES
Barnes, J. A., 1972. Social Networks, Addison-Wesley
Professional Press.
Benkler, Y., 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale
University Press.
Dengler, F. et al., 2009. Collaborative Process Develop-
ment using Semantic MediaWiki. In WM’09: 5th
International Conference of Professional Knowledge
Management. Köllen Verlag.
Harrer, A., Hever, R., Ziebarth, S., 2007. Empowering
researchers to detect interaction patterns in e-
collaboration. In AIED’07 International Conference
on Artificial Intelligence in Education. IOS Press.
Hornung, T. et al., 2008. Recommendation Based Process
Modeling Support: Method and User Experience. In
ER’08, 27th International Conference on Conceptual
Modeling. Springer-Verlag.
Khalaf, R. et al., 2009. Enabling Community Participation
for Workflows through Extensibility and Sharing. In
BPMS2'09, 2th International Workshop on Business
Process Management and Social Software.
Klink, S. et al., 2006. A Service-oriented Information
System for Collaborativ Research and Doctoral Edu-
cation. In ICEBE'06, IEEE International Conference
on e-Business Engineering. IEEE Computer Society
Press.
Koschmider, A., Song, M., Reijers, H.A., 2009. Advanced
Social Features in a Recommendation System for
Process Modeling. In BIS’09, 12th International Con-
ference on Business Information Systems. Springer-
Verlag.
Lubich, H.P., 1995. Towards a CSCW Framework for
Scientific Cooperation in Europe, Springer-Verlag.
Luzón, M.J., 2009. Academic Weblogs as Tools for E-
Collaboration Among Researchers. In: E-
Collaboration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and
Applications, Idea Group Publishing Press.
Reisig, W., 1986: Petrinetze: Eine Einführung, Springer-
Verlag. Berlin, 2
nd
edition.
Schramm-Klein, H., 2005. Wettbewerb und Kooperation
in regionalen Branchenclustern. In Kooperationen,
Allianzen und Netzwerke: Grundlagen - Ansätze –
Perspektiven, Gabler-Verlag.
Silva, A.R. et al., 2009. AGILIPO: Embedding Social
Software Features into Business Process Tools. In
BPMS2’09 2th International Workshop on Business
Process Management and Social Software.
van der Aalst, W., Song, M., 2004. Mining social net-
works: uncovering interaction patterns in business
processes. In BPM’04, 2th International Conference
on Business Process Management. Springer-Verlag.
Wasserman, S., Faust, K., 1994. Social Network Analysis:
Methods and Applications, Cambridge University
Press.
Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of practice: learning,
meaning and identity, Cambridge University Press.
Yamakami, T., 1998. Social Process Visualization in Re-
gional Community Network Users. In APCHI 98, 3th
Asia Pacific Conference on Computer Human Interac-
tion. IEEE Computer Society Press.
WEBIST 2010 - 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
366