CooMan - a global collaborative project management system

Project Coordination and Management have long been recognized as an area with growing problems and unsatisfactory solutions. Conciliating flexibility with target achievements is historically the main problem to face. The difficulties have been growing at more than linear ratio with the size and complexity of the Projects being developed in the present days. The HEP communities suffer additional challenges because of the distributed nature of the collaborations, the novelty of each project; and the less authoritarian form of leadership and management of team and individual. This prevents the adoption of more centralized focus on decision. CooMan intends to be a Global Collaborative Project Management System. This paper discusses the basic aspects of the concepts involved, outlining how task coordination, acts of speech, and World-Wide hyper media can be used to support project management activities. A distributed tool to implement such proposition is described, and a first prototype is presented