“Got COCA?” A new perspective in building electronic meeting systems

Abstract

In a previous paper[11], we presented COCA (Collaborative Objects Coordination Architecture) as a generic framework for developing collaborative systems. COCA advocates separation of coordination policies from general-purpose computations in collaborative systems so that the former can be modeled in a high-level specification language. Reuse of both coordination policies and collaboration tools can be achieved.This paper overviews the COCA model and focuses on the application of COCA in building real-life systems. We prototyped a modest set of tools for electronic meeting systems (EMSs) to show how they can be used to support both unstructured and structured meetings, with only changes in the coordination policies and no changes to the tools themselves. A subset of Robert's Rules of Order[21] was formalized and specified as an example of control of formal structured meetings. Finally the current status and the future directions are summarized.