The paper motivates and presents an approach for assembling innovative information-based products and services by virtual cross-organization communities of practice. Using a case study on assembling vacation packages, we describe the cross-organizational virtual partnership, the mechanics allowing it to operate as a virtual community of practice and how collective intelligence of the members is appropriated to ensemble innovative information-based products for tourists. The results provide useful insights into innovating through virtual networking as well as the ICT tools that may be used to foster value-creating networks of practice in boundary spanning domains.

The paper reports on the design of a prototype system to facilitate intertwining of on-line and off-line practices during collaborative networked music master classes. Our approach links with recent theoretical thinking inspired from the concept of communities of practice and aims to devise a system to provide a virtual 'place' for engaging in the practice the community is about. This implies a focus not only on community management (i.e., discovering, building, maintaining community) but also on constructing and reconstructing practice using a suitable interactive practice vocabulary. We demonstrate the challenges involved in building domain-specific, practice-oriented interactive vocabularies for collaborative music lessons and report on our recent experiences on the interplay between on-line and off-line practice.

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The paper describes an engineering method for building user interfaces for ubiquitous environments. The method comprises of several extensions in the UsiXML family of modes as well as design and runtime support so as to enable multi-platform, synchronous and collaborative interactions. We demonstrate key concepts of the method and their application by elaborating a scenario of collaborative co-play of the 'tic-tac-toe' game. The specific use case features synchronous co-engagement in game play by remote users (players or observers) using desktop PCs or Android devices.

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