This project investigates the nature and work of self-managed, voluntary teams operating in virtual spaces. The investigation is designed to provide a research basis for designing systems that will support advances in voluntary virtual teaming, and social computing more generally. The research addresses four high-level, interrelated questions: (1) How can social translucence be realized in systems to support the work of virtual teaming? (2) How can current models of self-organized and self-managed work teams be extended to address key features of voluntary teams working in virtual spaces? (3) What inter-group and intra-group characteristics of voluntary virtual teams enable meaningful understanding of a team's collaborative work and activities? (4) How can these characteristics be composed into socially translucent, system-generated views of teams?
The availability of rich data associated with voluntary project groups operating in Wikipedia provides the basis for this investigation. The research will combine model development, model testing, system design, and deployment to develop an understanding of virtual teaming in support of a larger vision of social translucence in online communities. The research focuses on broad, rich categories of interaction - within team and outside team - to elaborate the dimensions of virtual teaming that can productively be exposed through socially translucent design. The research is inherently structured as cycles of basic research and exploration, followed by design activities, design evaluations, development, and deployment. Through this process, the research will identify features of group interactions that can support views of project teams that are inspectable in a visualization system, which will be made available to the community itself.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in the elaboration of models of volunteer virtual teams and in the design and development of principles for group-oriented, socially-translucent systems. The research will extend social translucence as a framework for the development of systems in which virtual teaming occurs, and it will develop a robust model of voluntary virtual teaming, realizing relevant sociotechnical dimensions for potential community members, project managers, and social analysts. The broader impacts of this project include research-based improvements to systems supporting the interaction, contribution, and sensemaking activities engaged in by an ever increasing population of people collaborating online. The approach deploys socially translucent tools in the systems where people work collaboratively, allowing those who will benefit from such views to manipulate, extend, and refine such tools to realize greater potential in their endeavors.
