Virtual organizations (VOs) are increasingly significant to research and teaching. Traditional tools to support VOs (e.g., electronic mail) enable communication and coordination at a distance and across institutional barriers. In such cases, the organizational work of forming and sustaining VOs focuses on the use of these tools to foster trust and to negotiate equitable and efficient resource utilization. More recently, research in computer science has sought to delegate such organizational work to a new class of VO tools, collectively termed ?Grid? technologies. Grid technologies are envisioned to provide new modes of collaboration, improved allocation of scarce resources, and novel pathways for discovery and innovation. While past research has successfully addressed questions of long-distance communication and coordination involving traditional tools, much less is known about how new tools may transform VOs. Open questions include: the consequences of delegating trust, access and resource distribution to Grid-based systems; the challenges of sustaining computationally-supported VOs; and the new kinds of organizational roles and responsibilities necessary for the upkeep and maintenance of VOs.
This project undertakes a comparative study of VO formation and maintenance in two leading collaborative science networks: the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) and the Open Science Grid (OSG). Both LTER and OSG are mature enterprises for supporting multidisciplinary scientific research; however, they differ in the nature of their VO tool use. Whereas LTER uses a broad variety of conventional tools to augment organizational communication (exhibiting the communicational paradigm, or a 'weakly technically delegated' VO), OSG delegates key components of organizational life and maintenance to Grid-based mechanisms (i.e., a ?strongly technically delegated VO, exemplifying the computational paradigm). Using ethnographic and comparative methods, and drawing on theories from science and technology studies (STS), organization science, and human-computer interaction, this study will compare the different approaches taken by LTER and OSG to: i) provide a better and more sophisticated mapping of the characteristics of individuals, groups and organizations that embrace VOs; and ii) develop rigorous comparative models for the differential human and technical work which sustain VOs.
