Lightweight collaboration management

Collaboration processes are generally coordinated without an explicit notion of a guiding process. Even though this kind of work is performed in a rather structured manner, explicit software support to coordinate these processes is rare. On the other hand, process automation is mainly considered for highly frequent processes, due to the cumbersome setup of adequate systems and the process implementation effort. This paper presents a mashup that effectively coordinates humans who strive for a collaborative goal. Participants can design and enact their processes right away; a lightweight process execution engine automatically coordinates participants through correlated messages. In contrast to classic mashups, we turn the architecture upside down and orchestrate Web applications and their respective service APIs. A process map, similar to classic mapping mashups, gives insight into the current state of a process and its activities as well as information that is required to evaluate and trace process history.