Competence models and self-organizing systems: towards intelligent, evolvable, collaborative support

A number of modeling perspectives are relevant to the design of intelligent, adaptive, and collaborative support for humans who work in complex sociotechnical systems. We first describe the separate strands of normative models of activity and communication and self-organizing models of organizational adaptation to technology, and then braid them together to arrive at a coherent framework for the analysis and modeling of collaborative work in complex systems. From this integrated framework, we propose requirements for the design of collaborative support and develop these ideas in the context of the System Workbench and Facilitating Teams (SWIFT) architecture.<>