Because of their social and technical complexity, virtual organizations can only be understood fully through collaborative interdisciplinary approaches. The purpose of this project is to contribute to an enhanced, interdisciplinary understanding of the sociotechnical factors and dynamics influencing the effectiveness of virtual organizations. The project uses a stratified purposeful sample of ten virtual organizations, chosen to illustrate a variety of organizational characteristics, including: membership composition, size, boundary definition, function, duration, origin, and funding. The sample goes beyond virtual organizations in science and engineering to include a diverse group of distributed networks in a variety of sectors. The project has three goals: (1) to conduct a comparative mixed-methods meta-analysis of five existing virtual organizations leading to a consensual model for analyzing, categorizing, and evaluating their effectiveness; (2) to validate the conceptual model using data from five additional existing organizations, and retesting the model on the entire sample to explore variability; and (3) to disseminate the results to a broad, interdisciplinary research community. This project will have an exceptionally broad societal impact. The majority of virtual organizational knowledge has been generated from studying scientific collaboratories and corporate virtual teams. The empirical sample in this study has substantial representation from social and behavioral sciences, policy advocates, transnational non-governmental organizations, and civil society networks. This approach will encourage the broader diffusion of effective virtual organizations beyond the physical sciences and could have a substantial socioeconomic impact in society. The project participants and partners represent a deliberate attempt to engage with diverse researchers and will collaborate with existing initiatives designed to support underrepresented minority and disabled participation in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines. The project also places in the foreground issues of participation in virtual organizations by people with disabilities by focusing on accessibility of the cyberinfrastructure and universal design.
