E-professional

E-professional or "eprofessional" or even "eProfessional" is a term used in Europe to describe a professional whose work relies on concepts of telework or telecommuting: working at a distance using information and communication technologies, as well as online collaboration (i.e. virtual team,[1] mass collaboration,[2] massively distributed collaboration[3]), online community of practice such as the open source community, and open innovation principles.

The American terminology for e-professional is teleworker.

The concept of e-professional,[4] strongly related to the concept of ework, extends the traditional concept of professional in including any type of expert or knowledge worker intensively using ICT (Information and Communications Technology) environments and tools[5] in their working practices.

An eprofessional is a member of at least one community of practice which confers him the title of professional and can be either a freelancer or an employed worker. An e-professional is not working in isolation but actively collaborating with other e-professionals within virtual workspaces[6] called collaborative working environments (CWE).[7][8]

Working environments

Working practices are evolving from a traditional proximity or "geographical collocation" paradigm to a "virtual collocation" paradigm where experts and professionals have to work together and reach a common understanding regardless of the geographical separation of the workers involved.

E-professionals are both a result of new flexible business models and also the necessary pre-requisite for their implementation. A collaboration environment that can adequately support the needs of an E-professional must provide services on demand, based on the flexible work tasks of the user.

All of this can be linked to concepts of swarm intelligence.

See also

References
  1. J. Lipnack and J. Stamps, 1997, "Virtual Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time, and Organizations with Technology", Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-16553-0
  2. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams,December 2006, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
  3. Kapor presentation Archived 2006-07-19 at the Wayback Machine, UC Berkeley, 2005-11-09.
  4. Prinz, W.; Loh, H.; Pallot, M.; Schaffers, H.; Skarmeta, A.; Decker, S. ECOSPACE: Towards an Integrated Collaboration Space for eProfessionals
  5. M.A. Martinez Carreras, A.F. Gomez Skarmeta,2006, Towards Interoperability in Collaborative Environments
  6. Hans Schaffers, Torsten Brodt, Marc Pallot, Wolfgang Prinz (editors), March 2006, The Future Workspace Archived 2006-07-08 at the Wayback Machine
  7. Collaboration@Work Experts Group, February 2006, New Collaborative Working Environments 2020
  8. Collaboration@Work Experts Group, May 2004, Towards a middleware for collaborative work environments Archived 2011-07-20 at the Wayback Machine
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