Increasingly, researchers are addressing challenges of a scale and complexity that defy the boundaries of traditional academic fields as well as the limits of individual capacity. As new tools of inquiry based on advanced cyberinfrastructure have become available, many previously intractable issues have begun to be addressed by distributed, interdisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers. This is a proposal to study how large scale cyber-enabled science and engineering collaborations achieve success. It will primarily rely upon observation and interviews with members of exemplary project teams.
The research team plans to develop a novel, exploratory, socio-technically informed set of outcome-based best practices and evaluation criteria for large scale cyberscience. Research on the evaluation of large scale team science is still in its earliest stages and has not considered the broad range of potential success metrics and the long time frames required to evaluate cyberinfrastructure projects. Such a framework could potentially transform cyber-enabled grand challenge communities, radically improve the ability to identify and assess categories of project impact across levels of scale, and guide future development of appropriate cyberinfrastructure tools.
