a view on CoPE (Community of Practice Environment).

I would like to discuss about challenges, trends and experiences of community based software like web portal EPA.Net and the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) using CoPE. CoPE is a web-based tool for groups to democratically work together and decide upon actions of common interest.


So, what exactly is CoPE? CoPE stands for Community of Practice Environment. CoPE is built by modifying an open source content management system called Plone with presentation code implemented in HTML and CSS and back-end in python. It is a web-based tool for primarily focused on informal groups that might lack IT expertise and the resources to purchase it to democratically work together and decide up on actions of common interest. Information is represented in the form of a document such as a Microsoft Word document, PDF Document, or text. The CoPE system is designed to support the creation of documents, sharing them with the group, discussing a document, and ultimately making decisions on it as a group. This process is captured through a workflow where the document goes through different states like submitted, voting, approved, archived etc. as it progresses. Another feature of CoPE is that it can be customized to the group's needs through selection on discrete parameters. A site coordinator organizes the activity of each CoPE site. Finally, CoPE is not a tool for group editing, Version Control and Management and synchronous collaborations like live virtual meetings and chat. Some of these may be implemented in the future versions of CoPE.


Some of the advantages of CoPE are it makes the user experience smoother for the non-technical population by providing a simple interface. The interface for CoPE attempts to eliminate technical jargon and make basic tasks easy to perform and also it provides online documentation on how to perform various tasks. The governance and decision making style of CoPE is democratic. This concept is most obviously seen in the document voting process. The installation and operation of CoPE requires no advance technological skills. CoPE allows more flexibility for groups by allowing them to customize the system based on a pre-determined set of parameters such as the voting mode for documents.


The Challenges faced by CoPE are factors like community congestion, Targeted groups lacking technical Skill and Existing software targeted to Organizations which already have a pre-existing imposed structure. Other is Abuse of such Open Source models is highly frowned upon by the technical open source/hacker communities. The stability lifespan has significantly shortened for Internet enabled applications because of the target of malicious software.


In Conclusion, I would like to say that system proves useful in a range of different settings and is being tried in others. The initial start up is still harder than it should be and currently requires some direct interaction. Much work remains to be done, but they believe that they have shown that an open, user-friendly, platform for cooperative work is feasible and could have a profound effects.