Definition:Behavioral facilitation deals with a multi-disciplinary effort to help people work together.
By its very nature, collaboration is fundamentally behavioral in focus: people interact with other people using technologies and tools to achieve some (set of) goal(s)Footnote 1. How well a tool is used and the caliber of interaction between collaborators, both affect the success of a collaborative effort. As such, these aspects are naturally influenced by the underlying technological environment. That is, the behavior of the collaborators and the collaborative artifacts are affected by the ability of the infrastructure to facilitate desired and appropriate behaviors.
The significance of behavioral issues can be seen in relation to coordination theory [1], a multi-disciplinary effort which aimed at developing “coordination technology” to help people work together more effectively and efficiently, via an integrated theory based on how coordination occurs in a variety of systems.
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While espoused in a people-centric manner, an analogous perspective can be applied to virtually any collaborative system.
References
T. W. Malone and K. Crowston, “The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination,” ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1994, pp. 87–119.
R. W. Robbins, “Facilitating Intelligent Media Space Collaboration via RASCAL: The Reflectively Adaptive Synchronous Coordination Architectural Framework,” PhD Thesis, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, 2001.
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(2006). Behavioral Facilitation. In: Furht, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Multimedia. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30038-4_12
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