Software for the "Roles" People Play

Abstract

Office work consists largely of cooperative efforts by numbers of people. To support such work, applications programs can be designed as "multi-person" systems organized around notions of "roles" and "working relationships." A group of co-workers can then describe to the system their agreed upon roles in a project as well as the working relationships among those roles. Based on this description, application software can provide support for communications protocols and access control that is tailored to the working situation. As working relationships evolve, these descriptions can be modified so that the software will continue to meet the needs of the users. The paper presents an approach to office systems research emphasizing the development of software modules that can be used to build end-user application programs. The requirements that "multi-person" applications place on this software architecture are discussed in the context of a series of examples of multi-person activities, including joint document writing and calendar management.