BrainBridges

BrainBridges (www.brainbridges.info) was a coordinated strategic European research programme in the area of Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) and enabling technologies.

Business and distributed collaboration have been changing radically over the last years. Business environments demand increased flexibility, interconnectivity, and autonomy of involved systems as well as new coordination and interaction styles for collaboration between people. The latest trends in distributed and mobile collaboration technologies allow people to move across organizational boundaries and to collaborate with others within/between organizations and communities. But some questions exist like:

• How to enable users to retain their ability to cooperate while displaced in different points of the (or even different) enterprise(s)?
• What is the role of context and location in determining how cooperation can be carried out?
• How to provide support for ad-hoc cooperation in situations where the fixed network infrastructure is absent or cannot be used?
• How will Service-oriented computing and convergence of technologies change collaborative software?

By uniting a critical mass of key regional and national funding organisations, research and industry players, including a significant amount from New Member States, BrainBridges assures its ability to develop a truly pan-European ERA pilot for CWE. In order to deliver a coordinated European research programme providing a solid common basis for policymaking and programme coordination, BrainBridges is building:

• A sustainable community dedicated to knowledge exchange and the establishment of a coordinated European CWE research programme
• Suitable networking infrastructure including an IST Collaboration Platform
• Leverage of the available scientific excellence and industry relevance This will be achieved by systematically gathering and analysing knowledge on a regional, national and European level, regarding the current structure of CWE research funding as well as multi-disciplinary CWE research issues.

BrainBridges was funded by the Information and Society Technologies (IST) priority of the EU’s Sixth Framework initiative. The project officially began on 15/02/2005 and will ran until 14/11/2007. (with an approved extension).

TSSG Contact Details:

Claire Fahy

cfahy@tssg.org