Shaping Collaborative Work With Proto-Patterns

A shared set of processes and norms as well as a shared understanding of the collaboration infrastructure is a vital aspect for collaboration. This paper investigates how practitioners of virtual organizations can be supported in creating, sharing, and applying best practices that form the basis for a shared understanding of collaboration processes. Extending the interpretation of end-user development to a the development of processes and technology, best practice descriptions document proven social processes as well as guidelines for end-user appropriation and utilization of groupware tools. We propose a practice creation process, show how proto-patterns can be used for documenting best practice, and explain how they help to gain a socio-technical perspective on the shared practices. The approach has been used to create a best practice collection for efficient meetings.