Two coordination workshops, and supporting organizational meetings, are proposed for United States federal agencies that have programs currently funding research into scientific virtual organizations. These efforts support an emerging "Science of Team Science" that seeks to understand the sociotechnical infrastructure required for successful distributed eScience practice. Partnering with the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program, these proposed workshops will bring together agency leaders, program officers, and staff from organizations as diverse as NIH, NSF, NIST, NASA, DOE, DARPA, and DHS for dialogue about their needs, visions, and funding plans for Science of Team Science research.

The first workshop, tentatively scheduled for Winter 2012, will be a planning and coordination session among key Washington, D.C.-based agency stakeholders. A second integration workshop, targeted for Spring/Summer 2013, will be a broader, more inclusive event incorporating staff from all relevant agencies and national labs. These workshops will be supported by a series of organizing meetings and will result in a draft NITRD/NSF report.

Distributed eScience is the rapidly realizing future for almost all scientific inquiry. The goals of this project are to better understand the public policy underlying this transformation and to enable the super additive effects of coordinating funding efforts across multiple agencies. The promise of developing a clear, unified agenda is a more rapid maturation of both scientific methods and policies in support of eScience.

Project Report

The future of the scientific enterprise inexorably trends toward computation and collaboration. As a result there is an increasing emphasis on team-enabled "big science." United States federal funding agencies routinely encourage multi-investigator, multi-discipline, multi-institution efforts. While there is an expanding body of literature that examines the dynamics and effectiveness of these approaches, it is unclear how much of this "science of team science" informs the design, solicitation, review, and evaluation of federally-awarded grants and contracts. There are many high profile examples of otherwise competent projects run aground by problematic team dynamics. What are the evidence-based best practices for collaborative readiness and ongoing team management? This award provided operational support for a series of five workshops exploring the current practices of evaluating and managing science team. The first four workshops were agency-only events with the goal of developing a general guidance document and templates for collaboration readiness plans. In the fifth workshop these ideas and draft documents were vetted by an invited team of multidisciplinary experts from industry and academe. The inter-agency workshop series was coordinated by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program of the National Science and Technology Council's (NSTC) Committee on Technology as supported by the National Coordination Office (NCO). Specifically, the sub-committee on Social, Economic, and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development (SEW). Running parallel to these workshops was an investigation into the current state-of-the-art in conceptualizing team science across the federal government. Grant solicitations (aka FOA or BAA) are the primary means of communication by which agencies articulate the types of projects they are looking to fund. These documents are carefully crafted to be both specific enough to encourage submissions that match the agencies' objectives and flexible enough to afford investigator creativity. They must also meet the strict legal requirements of the funding agency, express the goals of the individual program, and align with other programs under the agency’s purview. Solicitations are consequently imbued with the worldview of the agencies that create them. This survey exercise involved collecting and analyzing a corpus of 96 representative solicitations over the past ten years from 14 different agencies. The results reveal meaningful connotative differences in the use of key terms such as team, collaboration, coordination, interdisciplinary, and cross-institution. There is a tendency to under-define terms, leaving their interpretation up to the principle investigator and review teams. However, there are some key examples where the specific characteristics or configuration of the desired teams is outlined. Budget thresholds often serve as proxy for team complexity. While some larger initiatives do acknowledge the need for explicit engagement of team science mechanics with required sections for management, coordination, or collaboration plans there is little guidance for content or quality metrics. This mapping of relevant dimensions of team science provides a baseline for the current framing of federally funded team science and a design space to explore best practices.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Advanced CyberInfrastructure (ACI)
Type
Standard Grant (Standard)
Application #
1251296
Program Officer
Marilyn McClure
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2012-10-01
Budget End
2014-09-30
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2012
Total Cost
$49,999
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Baltimore
State
MD
Country
United States
Zip Code
21250