A distributed architectural approach to supporting work practice

This dissertation presents an architectural style to directly support the formal and informal relationships that underlie work. Rather than supporting work with the formal definition of work processes or by enhancing the capabilities of users in small groups, as have many previous approaches, the focus of this work is on the structure of coordination within the organization.;The work is guided by three specific goals. The first is to provide scoped information and communication spaces surrounding work activities occurring within the system. This is done at the level of task, user, group, and larger organizational structures. The second goal is to provide decentralized ownership and control of work product and process, allowing them to be defined and maintained within their context of creation and use. Finally, the style seeks to support work at varying levels of definition, integrating structured models of work with ad-hoc work activity.;The foundation of this style is a peer-to-peer architecture, each peer providing an independent addressable location associated with a particular user. The peer's workspace is subdivided into task spaces to provide locations to associate resources for individual tasks. These task spaces serve not just to organize the user's work but also to provide independent points of connection with larger organizational structures (and the related tasks of other users). Independent connectors, with their own addressable identities, define the relationships between task spaces and also provide the mechanism for defining larger, more complex, organizational relationships. The model of authority is a compositional one. Rather than authority to access and manage resources being devolved from a central server, users maintain control of their individual peers and enter into trust relationships with other peers or groups.;The style is demonstrated and validated using two mechanisms. First, it is applied to a range of coordination processes and organizational structures taken from prior literature. Second, a prototype implementation is described along with its application to an example work process.