This award supports a Doctoral Consortium (DC) at the 2010 ACM GROUP Conference to be held November 7-10, 2010 in Sanibel Island, FL. The ACM GROUP conference is held bi-annually, bringing together researchers and practitioners from the fields of organizational behavior, information systems, social informatics, information sciences, and computer supported cooperative work. The focus of the DC is the intellectual content of the students' doctoral research projects. Students are selected for attendance based on competitive review of the materials supplied. These projects represent state-of-the-art research in the study and development of organizational systems, information systems, social informatics, and computer supported cooperative work. The DC creates a social network among the next generation of researchers and several senior mentors selected from top academic institutions and research laboratories. Students and mentors will be a diverse group on several dimensions (nationality, scientific discipline, gender, institutional affiliation, under-represented minority status), therefore participation in the consortium will broaden the students' intellectual and social perspectives at a critical stage in their professional development.
This award provided support for a doctoral research colloquium at the 2010 International Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP’10). The primary goal of this event was to advance the human-centered computing research community through the professional betterment of the next generation of socio-technical scholars. The colloquium consisted of one full-day pre-conference event focused on expert and peer critique of each student’s dissertation research project. A mid-conference poster session provided the students with additional visibility and opportunities for feedback from all conference participants. Two mid-conference breakout sessions covered professional and career development including networking, navigating the job market, and the promotion and tenure process. The NSF funds were able to provide partial travel support, conference registration, and coverage of meeting expenses for 11 advanced doctoral students and three volunteer senior faculty mentors. Participants were selected to be advanced Ph.D. students (post-candidacy) who were far enough along in their dissertation research to have preliminary findings, but not so far along that it would preclude integration of feedback from the colloquium. The competitive selection process was sensitive to gender, institutional, ethnic and geographic diversity yielding a dynamic and representative group. Much of the skills development occurred in cross-disciplinary training in research methods, both data collection and analysis/interpretation, by the mentors and peer participants. The post-event assessment confirmed that this was the most important and valuable take-away. The outcomes of the event included: (1) building a cohort group of new researchers who now have a network of colleagues spread across the world; (2) guiding the work of the new researchers by having experts in their research fields give constructive criticism; (3) providing encouragement and support for the selection of CSCW/Group relevant research topics; (4) making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend a leading research conference; (5) illustrating the interrelationship and diversity of Group research; (6) making the new entrants' experience at the Group conference an enjoyable and rewarding investment, encouraging them to become more actively involved in this research community. Given the continued integration of information and communication technologies into the work, personal, and social lives of United States citizens, developing these talented researchers who bridge the social, organizational, and computing sciences has been a wise investment.
