GISMOO: collaborative planning for civil infrastructure management in a simple Web-enhanced virtual environment

The GISMOO project examined the collaborative planning behavior of an existing team of practitioners in the Public Works Division of a US Army base through the use of a simple Web-enhanced virtual environment. Comparisons were drawn between the behaviors of the work group while communicating face to face, and while communicating synchronously via an online virtual conference room based on MOO (Multi-user Object Oriented) technology enhanced by a Web interface. The results of this project showed that the use of an online virtual environment for collaborative planning is practical and could be beneficial, especially to physically dispersed work groups. The value of the conference room tools was not proven in this study, primarily as the structure of the scenarios did not support the asynchronous portion of the team's collaborative work well. The behavior of the work group using the collaboration tool changed in generally predictable ways as compared to face to face communication.