Some of today's technologies are aimed at providing collaboration support for the workday activities of distributed groups. While existing collaboration environments have come a long way in providing capabilities to support group work, issues such as usability, flexibility and interoperability remain. The Orbit work aims to overcome such obstacles through the development of a next generation collaboration environment. Strauss' social world model addresses the understanding, analysis and reasoning about group work in complex domains. The Orbit work takes many of the social concepts in Strauss' model and applies them to support collaboration activities through networks of computers using locales.
Locales are virtual places for group work situated in the computer network.
The locales framework integrates five principles necessary for distributed group collaboration. These principles are locale foundations, mutuality, individual views, interaction trajectories, and civic structures. A locale can be thought of as a focal point around which to define, structure, and relate the relevant people, objects, tools, and resources germane to a particular collaboration activity. The locales foundations principle captures the basic domain structuring and furnishing of work. The civic structure principle deals with facilitating interaction with the wider community beyond an individual's immediate workgroups and locales.