Approach

ACTIVE will go beyond existing software by following an integrated approach that does not stop at isolated solutions but integrates them into a whole which serves to boost knowledge worker productivity.
This integrated approach will provide knowledge workers with tagging, collaborative filtering and support for knowledge processes, and lightweight approaches for aggregation of knowledge tasks.
ACTIVE will further combine this with the continuous context adaptation needed to create a personalised experience, and also with methodologies and incentives based on a thorough understanding of the socio-economic environment of the enterprise. All these technologies and approaches, taken together, will very significantly improve knowledge workers’ efficiency and effectiveness.

The overall strategy of ACTIVE consists of four explicit strategic guidelines:

Pursuit of a multidisciplinary approach for supporting knowledge workers in increasing their tacit productivity along 4 clearly defined and complementary research foci:
•    Advancement of massively collaborative and lightweight knowledge sharing systems towards expressive knowledge articulation
•    Analysis, detection and optimization of collaborative knowledge processes and discovery of work contexts
•    Proactive support and optimization of highly tacit knowledge processes
•    Design and analysis of incentive mechanisms and economic tradeoffs in massively collaborative systems
These are united by the common vision of the knowledge workspace.

To allow easy uptake of project results, ACTIVE technology development will be based on lightweight and flexible software components that (i) adopt open standards and (ii) can easily be integrated with common business software as typically used in the target user communities.

To ensure and assess the validity of the project results, ACTIVE will follow an agile development methodology with continuous case study communication and recalibration. The match between the research results against user needs and business goals and their uptake in the ACTIVE case studies will be continuously monitored, evaluated and assessed by internal evaluation partners.

ACTIVE will follow a proactive impact creation strategy which will synchronize evaluation, dissemination, exploitation, and training activities, with well-defined paths into sector-specific user communities and ensure impact creation beyond project lifetime.