Bizzilla: A Collaborative Task Management Environment with Expert Finding

Researchers put enormous amounts of time and effort into collaborative tasks, such as writing up research proposals or papers. Typically, for such tasks, collaborators use an ad hoc combination of different tools, from version control software, latex editors, instant messaging and emails, to keep track of the tasks status. Time is inevitably wasted in pooling together the various resources and to keep them synchronised, as well as to monitor the status of the subtasks assigned to the different collaborators. Furthermore, it is at times required to quickly seek expertise advice from colleagues about particular aspects of the ongoing research task. In this paper we present Bizzilla, a collaborative task management environment with expert finding capabilities. Bizzilla is based on a plug-in architecture and provides a suite of tools that allow for collaborative task management, real-time collaborative editing, automatic resource synchronisation, instant-messaging and expert-finding based on the idea of collaborative opportunism.