Phases and Success Criteria of Collaboration in the Ubiquity Era

The urge to collaborate is deeply anchored in human nature. This is substantiated by evidence for different forms of group work already performed by early humans (e.g., when defending against threats). Over time, the behavior of working together, the motivation behind and the technological support have changed which also broadened the spectrum of collaborative activities. Especially today, on the brink of the ubiquity era that envisions a person to use thousands of computers everyday, new pre-conditions for co-located and remote, planned and spontaneous collaboration are manifested. Thus, previous models that distinguished between phases of collaboration such as starting, planning, executing and reporting might become less applicable. The relevance of the emergence of collaboration phase, which has been considered only marginally so far, is likely to increase drastically. This position paper discusses considerations on the nature of collaboration throughout the ubiquity era and suggests an accordingly extended phases of collaboration model.