Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science (2015) / Chapter Skim
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7 Supporting Virtual Collaboration
7 Supporting Virtual Collaboration
Pages 151-176
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Because many of the disadvantages that arise from being distant from one's colleagues can be mitigated by various kinds of technologies, we next describe the suite of technologies available to support distance science. We then summarize how technology addresses some of the challenges of being geographically distributed.
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if any, funding, and the type of collaboratory, based on a proposed typology. special challenges FOR geographically dispersed larger groups or teams Challenges for geographically dispersed groups include members being blind and invisible to one another; time zone differences; differences across institutions, countries, and cultures; and uneven distribution of members across participating locations.
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. Finally, people starting a virtual collaboration may have difficulty establishing a work norm, and individuals joining an existing virtual group may have difficulty learning and adhering to such a norm once it has been established.
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provide support for these challenges, but other international groups are left to deal with these challenges on their own. Uneven Distribution of Group Members Across Participating Locations Often, members of geographically dispersed groups are not evenly distributed across all participating locations (O'Leary and Cummings, 2007)
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. As discussed in detail later in this chapter, working in a distributed group involves communication and coordination through collaboration technologies ranging from e-mail and audio/videoconferencing to more sophisticated systems for scheduling time and sharing documents or data.
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Such supports include providing fair and transparent rewards for virtual teamwork and maintaining ongoing, transparent communications while managing information flow. These and other leadership strategies that can help increase the effectiveness of virtual science teams are discussed below.
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-- another process shown to improve team effectiveness. As such, virtual teams and groups are more likely to be successful if they engage in activities designed to overcome the lack of opportunities for shared experience, focusing, for example, on establishing common vocabularies and work style as explicit goals (Olson and Olson, 2014)
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found that spatial boundaries (working across different cities) and temporal boundaries (working across time zones)
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How Organizations can support VIRTUAL COLLABORATION Geographically distributed science teams and larger groups are typically composed of members from separate organizations (e.g., universities)
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. One recent study found that leadership that is shared and provides structural supports (e.g., providing fair and transparent rewards for virtual teamwork, managing information flow)
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Technology to support virtual collaboration In this section, we first review the kinds of technologies that have been used to support distributed work, with different kinds of work benefiting from different constellations of technologies. The committee's framework follows closely that of Sarma, Redmiles, and van der Hoek (2010)
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Instant Messaging (IM) , sharing primarily simple text messages with another person or even a group, has made significant inroads into organizations.
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. Similarly, when video shows facial expressions and eye contact information, because those modes of expression are interpreted differently in different cultures, people again may make wrong attributions of interest and consent.
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The large groups of space physicists participating in the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory and Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory used chats extensively to converse during their "campaigns," periods when the sun's activity impacted the upper atmosphere. The automatically recorded chats allowed people to "read in" to the conversation (scrolling back and reading what had been happening)
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. Shared calendars can be particularly valuable for geographically dispersed colleagues who are in different time zones, reminding people of when the workdays overlap and where they do not.
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Informal meeting support tools typically take the form of a simple projected interactive medium, such as a Word outline or a Google Doc. The outline lists the agenda items at the highest level in the outline; during the meeting, a scribe takes notes that everyone can view and implicitly vet.
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. Information Repositories Whether a science team or larger group is co-located or distributed, it often needs to organize and manage shared information.
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Many large science groups have goals that include sharing data across sites. For example, in the early development of the Biomedi BOX 7-2 User-Centered Design for Collaboration Technologies Technology intended to support virtual collaboration sometimes does not support it and even poses a barrier to collaboration (Crowston, 2013)
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. In some domains of science, the laboratory notebook is a key tool for recording and vetting information.
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The large-scale computation technology is either local or hosted on a private grid of secure machines, and, at NSF-funded centers, the data, often large, are stored on their own massive servers. At a more fundamental level, only a few large research projects can afford to create their own data storing and sharing systems; many scientists still rely on Microsoft Excel software.
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. A more recent example is the NanoHub,7 a special computational infrastructure for nanoscience and nanotechnology.
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. Therefore, which technologies are chosen for a particular science team or group, and how these technologies are managed, can have an impact on the success of the collaboration.
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HOW Technology and Social practices CAN ADDRESS THE CHALLENGES of virtual collaboration We next consider some examples of how technology and particular social practices can address each of the challenges we have identified to remote collaboration Being Blind and Invisible Videoconferencing and awareness tools can be used to increase visibility of participants as well as display who is working on what. Because it is important to communicate explicitly about the nature of work to be done as well as to share contextual information surrounding the work, videoconferencing can provide a feeling of presence for remote members and permit gestures, linguistic cues, and other ways to enhance communication among virtual team members.
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Groups that use such information repositories can document and track changes in regulation and intellectual property laws as they are occurring. Because all members have access to the latest information posted on the wiki, and can add, modify, or delete as necessary, the task of keeping national information up to date is shared across group members.
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Uneven Distribution of Members Across Participating Locations Skillful use of meeting support technology can facilitate and broaden participation in decision making (e.g., by distributing a dynamic agenda) , build procedural fairness (e.g., through electronic voting)
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Conclusion. Technology for virtual collaboration often is designed without a true understanding of users' needs and limitations, and even when a suite of appropriate technologies is available, users often do not recognize and use its full capabilities.
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