ScenariWiki

Génie des Systèmes Urbains (GSU) is the urban engineering faculty of the University of Compiegne. The educational program for the faculty students includes practical projects that run for a semester. Such projects are highly collaborative, and include typical project oriented tasks, such as meetings, presentations, expert interviews, periodic reports and dissemination activity. The principal challenge of the project is on aggregating, synthesizing and consolidating information. As such they are representative for project collaboration and well suited for our evaluation purpose.

As part of a sixth month project in urban engineering twenty students work in four specialized groups (e.g. electric, masonry, etc) on the renovation of cultural historic monuments. At the time, the students are inventorying the renovation that needs to be done on chateau Chantilly. For this, they interview domain specialist, and make on-site inspections. The final goal of the project is to define a prioritized list of renovation actions, and author a publishable report (+/-200 pages) that details and prioritizes the actions that have to be carried out.

There is a project leader, which is responsible for the progress of the project. He works in close collaboration with the editor of the report, which is a "living" document throughout the project. The project report is filled with contributions from each group that are typically rewritten for homogenization. Typically, there is a fair amount of discussion around the groups contributions and the integrated results in the report.

Once a week a plenary meeting is organized between groups, where they discuss their progress and layout their plans for the coming week. Furthermore, there is a common document repository that is accessible to all students, where documents are shared and there is a lively discussion on the mail. Besides that the groups and often the students within the group work relatively independently during the week.

Based on discussions with students participating in the project we identified the following use-cases that, with the currently used tools prove time consuming and cumbersome.

1. "Ludvine is project manager, she plans and monitors the authoring tasks leading to the final report, which is due in 2 months. Although, project members are working well, she has difficulties getting an accurate overview of the current progress, because contributions "float" around in the shared repository and she is not sure to always have access to the latest version." (workflow management)

2. "Ludvine also spends significant effort on external communication. Domain experts from the chateau Chantilly foundation are eager to monitor their progress. They also like to inform the public that restoration is a time consuming operation. Finally, she regularly meets with her supervisor to discusses project progress. Whenever external communication is necessary she asks the help from her project members to provide her with a couple of slides, or a page describing their progress. Unfortunately, people are often busy and they are not too motivated to provide her slides, because they have better things to do." (content re-purposing)

3. "Camille is editor of the final report, she integrates and homogenizes contributions, which is a tedious and time consuming tasks. Typically, people send her a Word document, from which she copy-paste the contribution in the final report. Unfortunately, the contributions often use different styles to indicate chapter, section, subsection etc. As a result she sometimes makes mistakes and positions the contribution incorrectly in the final report. As she receives a lot of contributions in a short time, such errors are typically not immediately noticed. Resolving the errors at a later stage is often time consuming as it requires going back and forward trough the source document." (aggregation management)

4. "Camille also homogenizes the contributed text. For example, she puts the text in the same tense and tries to be consistent in the terminology used. Since she is not an expert in all domain, it happens that she involuntary slightly changes the meaning of the contribution. Typically, such errors are noticed during the weekly project meetings when they discuss the current status of the final report. The original author sends her a revised version of the specific contribution, which is to be integrated. She has to pay attention to what she does because managing different versions of the same contribution is a tedious an error prone task." (version management)

1. Ludvine doesn't have a clear view of the project status, partly because the project deliverable does not accurately reflect the status of the project. This is because the contributions of the project have to be integrated in the report. Since there is a single editor (multiple editors would complicate matters even further), this typically takes time. In Scenari-Nuxeo, contributions are included by reference, which makes the aggregation and integration of contributions significantly simpler. As a result, the time between the submission of a contribution and its integration in the document is shorter. Therefore, the status of the report reflects better the status of the project.

2. Ludvine is obliged to ask her project partners to provide input to the presentation she has to give. However, with Scenari-Nuxeo she can easily grab fragments she finds appropriate from the different groups and combine them in a presentation. In addition, she might correct a typo or improve one or two sentences. Since the fragments are included by reference, they are fixed in the report as well.

3. Camille has the tedious task to copy-paste contributions in the final report. This is bound to go wrong at some time and fixing the error can be tedious. In Scenari-Nuxeo fragments follow a pre-defined model that is enforced by the editor. Consequently, the contributions are formatted identical. Consequently, Camille can focus on the homogenization of the text and does not have to worry about the formatting.

4. Besides integrating new contributions, Camille also needs to revise and replace existing contributions, which is time consuming and error-prone. In Scenari-Nuxeo, she can authorize a contributor to revise his or her contribution directly in the final report.

To evaluate whether or not structured authoring of fragmented documents does reduce collaborative overhead, we plan a user trial during the GSU student project. During this project students will use the Scenario-Nuxeo software and provide qualitative feedback by means of periodical (two eeks) surveys and quantitative feedback by logging the document repository. In parallel, we intend to monitor another student project that does not make use of the Scenari-Nuxeo software. We expect 15-20 students to participate that have no prior experience with Scenari. To get them acquainted with the software they will participate in a half day course.

Based on the surveys and log data we establish the effort spend on specific project activity, such as content creation, content editing, content aggregation, meeting, discussion, research etc. These values will be compared to the other group not using Scenario-Nuxeo.