Emcore – Emotional Cooperative Groupware: A Groupware Tool For Collaborative Work

In the last years considerable effort has been spent to develop groupware applications. Despite this, no general consenus has been met by groupware applications in computer field. Interdisciplinary approach could prove very useful to overcome these difficulties. A workgroup is not simply a set of people gathered together, working for a common goal. It can also be thought as a strong, hard mental reality. Actually, sociological and psychological definitions of group differ considerably. At sociological level a group is generally described in the view of the activities and events occurring inside the group itself. On the other hand, the psychological group approach considers not only the actions occurring inside the group, but also all the mental activities originated by belonging to the group, be they emotional or rational nature. Since early '60 simple work group (i.e. discussion group) has been analyzed in his psychological behavior. EMCORE is a prototype which aims to support computer science methods with psychological approach. The tool has been developed for a discussion group supported by heterogeneous distributed systems and has been implemented according to the CORBA abstraction augmented by the machine independent JAVA language. The tool allows all the common activities of a discussion group: discussion by voice or by chatting board if multimedia device are not present; discussion and elaboration of a shared document by text and/or graphic editor. At the same time, tools are provided for the psychoanalytic approach, according to a specific methodology.