MoRoCo 2013: Models and their Role in Collaboration

Using visual representations of work or business processes can be considered a common practice in modern organizations. These models serve a large variety of different purposes such as documentation of current practices, or informing and planning change or software development. Given the nature of work and businesses they reflect it is reasonable to develop and use them collaboratively. There are, however, also many downsides to collaborative model usage and development in current practice. Among others, models are often not fully understood and are thus not used by people who work in the processes the models represent, resulting in limited impact of process redesign on everyday work. Furthermore, only a minority of people within organizations actually use models, even though they have been proven to be very useful especially for collaborative work. Given the increasing popularity of models in organizations, understanding and defining their role in collaboration is of vital interest for the CSCW community and therefore this workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners and forming a community for research in this area.