Notes from Collaborative Expedition Workshop #44 Notes from Collaborative Expedition Workshop #44

I went to the Collaborative Expedition Workshop #44, Pioneering Governance Mechanisms for Collaboration: Toward High-Performance Mission Delivery in a Networked World at the National Science Foundation Friday morning. Very cool that they are having these open workshops and that my professor forwarded the announcement. I’ve been reading just about everything I can get my hands on from CREW, so when I heard Judy Olson was speaking, it was a done deal. Unfortunately, the way it was laid out really limited what Olson could present. She was very rushed and had too big of a scope.

The workshop started with an introduction by Susan Turnbull, complete with ppt. Sometimes, if you’re just introducing the session and the speakers, you can kind of skip the slideshow. Then Suzi Iacono described the structure of National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development and everyone above and below them who has budget line items funding IT R&D.

Then we got to Olson’s talk. Now’s a good time to open and read her slides (rather large file) and review her handouts. She started out by talking about people throwing technologies at social problems (ah-ha!). Her group at UMich studies collaboratories both in the field and in the lab. Right now they’re doing an NSF-sponsored survey of a couple hundred collaboratories to find basic statistical information about them and to identify some to study in depth. The information is available on their page. She provides this taxonomy of collaboratories:

• Research Focus
• Distributed Research Center (all working on a common problem, but not a single product as a result)
• Shared Instrumentation (like Keck)
• Community Data Systems (distributed community, semi-public, wide interest)
• Open Community Contribution System (“micro contributions” like open source software and NASA Clickworkers)
• Practice Focus
• Virtual Community of Practice
• Virtual Learning Community (in service training or professional development)
• Expert Consultation

She then went through the TORC handout. The handout provides a laundry list of research findings on the nature of collaboratories and how to define success in collaboratories.

Instead of recapping the handout I’ll point out some interesting things that were mentioned by her or the audience as we went

• Under nature of work, it’s best if work is easily partitionable so that parts can be worked separately and interaction is to avoid drift. (ex. Software modules) A member of the audience says that this is well known for engineering design and in other places where the thinking is deductive (building up from parts). OTOH, the challenge right now is to do distance collaboration that supports inductive work – going from the larger picture. The speaker discussed how innovation (or discoveries) comes from creativity, immersion in data, and rumination. (ok, my aside, what about the Vygotsky? Thing that Wenger talks about that all learning is social? Hm)
  
• Veinott el al study – 1 place video actually is important, if there’s little or no common ground. Her example was in the case of two non-native English speakers who needed a lot more nuanced and immediate feedback to see if messages were received and understood.
  
• Group self-efficacy – the I-can-do-it-even-if-there-is-a-barrier thing for groups.
  
• An audience mentioned pair programming and if those results applied to this (not familiar with this myself) – the concensus was that it is different because there’s no free-riding in dyads

As I mentioned, Olson was very rushed in her presentation. The next speaker was Aaron Budgor of this new non-profit OSD (office of the secretary of defense) sponsored organization. I’ll not name it or link to it but it should be easily findable. His organization is doing acquisition reform (which, incidentally, has been trendy ever since those pesky issues at Valley Forge). They’re trying to accelerate the 15 year development cycle for military hardware to solve problems faster. Supposedly they broker interactions between sponsors and experts. My one question was how they identified experts (prior to the sponsor just whipping out the credit card). I was hoping, though not expecting, a response that they did some scientometrics or analysis of the literature or something equally rigorous and sciencey… Turns out that he just calls his friends who provide him with some names and they develop a “tree structure.” Ah-ha. Isn’t this what a lot of the previous acquisition reform has worked to stop? But anyway… I’m sure I misunderstood him.
Updated: mostly for formatting.  ¶ 12:21 AM| |cites (technorati) |