The objectives of this project are to explore how task, process, and interrelationship conflicts affect creative processes and what specific forms of conflict avoidance, management, and resolution strategies are conducive to promoting creative processes and organizational innovation. Computational models of specific individual, group, and organization characteristics will be used to define project configuration, which will influence the group and organizational dynamics in hypothetical Open Source Software development societies and cultures. Each such project entails a virtual organization and a community of practice, the members of which collaborate and coordinate their activities to design and develop innovative and creative software products. The simulation study is expected to generate hypotheses regarding mechanisms that open source software development societies could implement to improve organizational creativity at multiple resolutions, including human, team, and organization levels. The hypotheses will be generalized to suggest principles for design cognition and IT tool support that facilitates implementation of the selected strategies. Simulation-based design of such IT strategies will be enabled based on the developed testbed.
Broader Impact. During the period of the study, the PI will organize informal meetings at Auburn University to raise awareness on creativity research to facilitate development of an interdisciplinary group of researchers across engineering and social sciences faculty. The findings of the study will be transferred to the software modeling and design class offered by the PI at the Auburn University. This will enhance design learning and cognition via improved processes and activities (e.g., styles of collaborative problem solving) that will be hypothesized to be conducive to design creativity. A minority student, who is already working on an Open Source Software Development Process Simulation project as part of his master thesis under the supervision of the PI, will be funded as a graduate research assistant. This opportunity will increase the level of diversity in the Auburn Modeling and Simulation Group that is led by the PI.
