Abstract for: SILVERVIZ: Extending SILVER for coordination in distributed collaborative modeling

System Dynamics modeling projects commonly involve distributed team collaboration. Remote Collaboration can impose substantial burden of extra work for team project coordination, and research suggest that the difficulties of distance coordination have been a major contributing factor in shaping the success or failure of teams in some domains. (Gary M. Olson and Judith S. Olson. 2000). It is currently difficult for modelers to keep track of what changes fellow collaborators have made as a modeling project evolves. While proper information technology support is known to lessen the difficulties of remote collaborations, there is limited software support available for collaboration across System Dynamics modeling projects. The use of general technology such as email systems and wikis can lead to much needless effort to establish common understanding regarding the current status of work and in communicating recent changes. This paper describes the design of an extension to the open source SILVER system that provides a visual workspace that reduces such effort by keeping modelers notified on fellow modelers’ past activities and changes within modeling project, and to identify commonalities shared by multiple elements of a model.