Extending the scope of asynchronous collaboration: a matter of being autonomous and self-sufficient

Abstract

Asynchronous collaborative applications and systems have to deal with complexities associated with interaction nature, idiosyncrasy of groups and technical and administrative issues. Inclusion of requirements derived from them is costly (in time, resources and economically). Existing solutions addresses asynchronous collaboration via simplification of requirements and by using centralized models. In this paper we present LaCOLLA, a fully decentralized infrastructure for building collaborative applications that provides general purpose collaborative functionalities. The provision of those functionalities will avoid applications deal with most of complexities derived from groups and its members, what will help inclusion of collaborative aspects. The implementation of LaCOLLA follows the peer-to-peer paradigm and pays special attention to autonomy of its members and to self-organization of the components of the infrastructure. Another key aspect is that resources (e.g. storage) and services (e.g. authorization) are provided by its members (avoiding dependency from agents not belonging to group).