Creating a collaboratory in cyberspace: Theoretical foundation and an implementation

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Abstract
Internet applications such as the World Wide Web (WWW) have created the possibility of developing global collaborative platforms for supporting interactions between professionals and academics in various disciplines. While Web browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape have revolutionized the way we use the Internet, we envision the need for a theory‐based approach to the development of Collaboratories on the Internet. Based on complementarity theory, we provide a conceptual foundation for designing Collaboratories which maximize users’ value through the judicious choice of complementary design factors. We emphasize the need for developments in the area of “open”; collaborative systems, and suggest that analyzing the design problem from a complementarity theory standpoint can lead to useful insights regarding the value users derive from the system. We also describe the design and an early implementation of an MIS Collaboratory, which uses this theoretical foundation to organize information and to provide a forum for document‐centric, multimedia interactions between users. While the prototype focuses on the MIS discipline, we believe that the general principles of our design are applicable to other areas as well.