ARCADE: Action-Centered Rapid Collaborative Application Development and Execution

Synchronous collaborative applications typically take several programmer-years to develop because of the need for difficult-to-build capabilities required to resolve issues that emerge when multiple users execute potentially conflicting actions on the same data objects. It is therefore too costly to build bespoke collaborative applications for many tasks. Generic applications, however, are often poorly suited to specific requirements of a given task. This paper presents a conceptual implementation of an integrated collaborative system - ARCADE - to design and deploy complete collaborative applications for any problem domain. The system provides orders of magnitude reduction in development time. The resulting applications - ActionCenters - can guide the practitioners through well-designed collaborative work practices without requiring that they become collaboration experts. Adoption of ActionCenters can significantly increase diffusion of state-of-the-art collaboration in organizations.