Evaluating a Virtual-Community Centric Collaboration Life-Cycle Model for Sustainable Coordination:

A South African Public Sector perspective

Abstract

This paper appraises a Virtual-Community Centric Collaboration Life-Cycle Model (VCCCLM) inspired by the promise virtual communities present as an ideal platform to support coordination in a distributed collaborative work context. The appraised model promises a proactive, adaptive, reactive, and continuous coordination of activities of actors who must work together towards common goals across a segmented and distributed environment to mitigate duplication of efforts and incoherence while maximizing limited resource use. Thus, technological features that can support the coordination of widely distributed actors are validated. Drawing from the segmented, distributed South African Public sector as a case study with a specific interest in coordinating capacity-building interventions across its 226 municipalities, a collaborative scenario was deduced. To realize the evaluation, an expert review interview based on the given collaborative scenario aided by an Excelbased open-ended questionnaire as a validation tool was employed to ensure that the appraised model is relevant, comprehensive, practical, and useful to practitioners. The VCCCLM is aimed to streamline and ensure sustainable coordination of collaborative actions within the SA public sector where seamless coordination is inhibited by environmental factors such as size, multiple role players, and proximity. The appraisal results show that the model has great potential to support the coordination dynamics in the segmented and distributed SA Public Sector. The study brought forward some limitations from the feedback used to refine the model while taking cognizance of future work.