The Reciprocity Project. A P2p Meta-Groupware Supporting Co-Evolution And Reciprocity

Despite our efforts for ten years to identify and to take into account the issues of CSCW, the tailorable collaboration environments we have designed are not yet fully appropriated by final users.Among the issues we have identified, the lack of user implication in centralized systems seems the main obstacle today. Moreover, the inter-organisational context in which CSCW systems will be more and more used has serious impact on this issue and other ones, especially resource sharing, organisation and cohesion. The goals of the Reciprocity project are to develop a peer-to-peer meta-groupware supporting co-evolution and to evaluate its adequacy to address better the implication issue and the inter-organizational context impact. On top of the JXTA peer to peer middleware, we are building an XML middleware distributed on a network of web servers to manage distributed co-operative activities and resources.