Virtual Collaboration Spaces: Bringing Presence to Distributed Collaboration

This paper concerns the use of virtual worlds alongside web technologies for on-line collaborative activities. The potential of this combination of technologies lies in the complementary notions of presence that these technologies offer their users. After discussing the nature of synchronous and asynchronous distributed collaboration, we describe a virtual collaborative environment that has been developed for task-focused communities and support to them through specific problem-solving episodes. This environment has been subject to experiments involving the development and provision of expert advice in the context of the response to a large-scale emergency crisis.