Collaboration as an Activity Coordinating with Pseudo-Collective Objects

Abstract

A coalition is a collaborative pattern inwhich people must work together to accomplish atask, but where organizational constraintsstand in the way of their making use of thecoordination techniques that typically enablecollaboration. Trinity is a software systemthat uses a virtual world to provide coalitionswith synthetic coordination capabilitiesfunctionally equivalent to those that occurnaturally in an organized collaboration. Thevirtual world functions as a pseudo-collective object since it plays thecoordination role of a collective object. Thedesign philosophy underlying Trinity is heavilyinformed by some of the fundamental concepts ofActivity Theory. To illustrate these ideas, wewill examine below the case of coordinatingoperational information for the coalition ofpeople who maintain the stream of data coursingthrough a securities brokerage, describingalong the way the relevant Activity Theorybackground and the architecture of the virtualworld.