COOS 2016 - 4th International Workshop on Collaborative Online Organizations

There is a strong ongoing trend for traditional organizations to adapt to socially networked nature of human population. This trend allows organizations to be transformed from brick and mortar to a more online nature. In the collaborative online organizations workshop, we aim to understand the current range of nascent network centric organizations. At one end of the spectrum, this includes human efforts to form collaborative units. On the other end of the spectrum, we seek to understand techniques and methodologies for constructing online agent organizations that represent interests of their human counterparts and take actions autonomously. This workshop will reflect the impacts of social network proliferation and start of agent systems that exploit and explore opportunities heralded by the social media and ever faster pace of interconnectivity. Agents must multitask. Beyond performing their design tasks, they must be aware of the social climate of their environment. They must account for interactions with other agents and humans so as to perform social acts in order to complement their physical and speech acts.
Substantial amount of research work is ongoing in distributed knowledge management. Therefore, this workshop emphasizes the operational elements of social networks that facilitate elements of online organization. Since this is the growing workshop on this topic, we continue to generate interest for a more in depth and wider span of explorations into the future. Social as well as cognitive foundations surrounding network organizations are of special interest and the focal theme for 2016. This theme includes nature of interactions among individuals engaged in meaningful exchange. Network organizations generate and reflect social capital embedded in collaboration networks that play central role for their continued functioning and maintenance. Explorations of roles of social capital are within our scope.
This workshop will attract experts from scientists, researchers and engineers interested in the theory and practice of computational models of network organizations. The objective is to advance understanding and crafting of network organizations. Papers describing advanced prototypes, systems, tools and techniques and position papers indicating future directions are also encouraged.