A bootstrapping scenario for elicitating CSCL services within a GRID virtual community

Amongst the various eLearning techniques, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is of growing interest within the academic world. However, during the first phase of the EleGI project, a noticable fact has been the difficulty to match the user needs with the potentiality of the GRID services. Thus, through a fictive scenario, this article proposes to walk the path between the idea of creating a new virtual community and the realisation of this objective. This scenario takes the situation of a famous scientist wishing to set a Virtual Centre of Excellence (VCE) and put the emphasis on the bootstap (i.e. the really first steps). An interesting comparison is to analyse this scenario firstly in a context using traditional techniques (system oriented architecture and Web services), then secondly using a service oriented architecture offered by the Grid services. Our aim is to match this bootstraping scenario with these contrasted contexts.