Managing Inter-Activities in CSCW: Supporting Users Emerging Needs in the COOLDA Platform

The CSCW research domain still tries to find a better way for supporting the users needs. Some groupware systems propose global and integrated environments supporting collaborative activities, but empirical studies show that these environments usually omit to support some dimensions of the work. On the other hand, some groups work with diverse applications that do not know each other. Mainly inspired by results coming from Social and Human Sciences, we believe that the complete CSCW environment cannot be defined a priori. However, we also believe that a global CSCW environment is really valuable for users. Taking our foundations in the Activity Theory, we aim at creating a global but tailorable environment that supports the dynamic integration of external applications and manages the links between them, i.e. it manages the inter-activities. This work is concretized in the CooLDA platform.