This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) for approximately 12 graduate students, along with a panel of 3 distinguished research faculty mentors. The event will take place in conjunction with the 2014 International Conference on Supporting Groupwork (GROUP 2014), to be held November 9-12 on Sanibel Island, Florida, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). For over 25 years, the bi-annual GROUP conferences have been a leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of research and practice on organizational behavior, information systems, social informatics, human-computer interaction (HCI), and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), providing a showcase for innovative work on the development, introduction, management, deployment, and analysis of computer-based collaborative systems. A strong emphasis of the GROUP conferences is to foster discourse on collaborative technology that bridges the fields of CSCW, information systems, technology enhanced learning, and learning at the workplace; relevant issues include the design, implementation, deployment, evaluation, and impact of these systems, as well as examinations of relevant research methodologies. Research reports published in the GROUP conference proceedings are competitively reviewed and widely cited. More information about the conference may be found online at www.acm.org/conferences/group/conferences/group14/.
The GROUP 2014 Doctoral Consortium (DC) will be a research-focused day-long meeting on Sunday, November 9, with follow-up events that take place during the conference's main technical program. Student participants will be later stage doctoral students from both the United States and abroad, who represent the various disciplines and subfields of interest to the conference. The goals of the workshop are to build a cohort group of young researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread across the world, to guide and shape the work of the new researchers by having experts serve as mentors and give advice, to provide encouragement and support for the selection of GROUP research topics, to make it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend a leading research conference and to illustrate for them the interrelationship and diversity of GROUP research, and in general to make the new entrants' experience at the GROUP conference enjoyable and rewarding, so that they will be encouraged to return and submit to future conferences in the series.
Broader Impacts: The GROUP conferences represent a critical link between the research communities supported by CISE/IIS and the broader social, behavioral, and management sciences. Maintaining and fostering research dialog among these diverse disciplines will result in synergistic and transformative research collaborations. Further, developing young researchers who can effectively bridge two or more of the broader CISE/IIS, social and management sciences is an important goal to ensure the future vitality of the IIS research community. The GROUP 2014 DC will bring together the best of the next generation of organizational systems, information systems, social informatics, and CSCW researchers. The social network among this next generation of researchers, and the relationships with senior researchers, created by the workshop will play a critical role in their enculturation into the profession. The organizers will be proactive in order to ensure that both students and faculty are a diverse group across multiple dimensions including nationality, scientific discipline, gender, institutional affiliation, and under-represented minority status. To further ensure diversity, no more than 2 student participants will be accepted from any one institution.
The GROUP 2014 Doctoral Consortium had three main goals: (1) Improve student participants' dissertation work through advice from faculty panelists and other students; (2) Build cohorts who will support each other throughout their careers; and (3) Integrate students into the broader intellectual community. To these ends, we chose three faculty panelists strongly connected to the GROUP community, which is broadly concerned with understanding and building technology for interpersonal interaction and team collaboration, with a diversity of intellectual fields, work styles, research topics, career histories, and demographics. These panelists were Dan Cosley (Cornell University), Geraldine Fitzpatrick (Vienna University), and Thomas Herrmann (Ruhr-University of Bochum). We chose students based on diversity of institutions, topics, and demographics; topical fit to faculty panelists and GROUP; and career stage (DCs tend to be most useful to 4th-year PhDs who are defining their dissertation work). Eleven students (ten female, one male) from eight institutions (one international) participated, representing domains including health care (dementia, children, pregnancy, electronic medical records), collaborative volunteer work (Wikipedia and open source software), civic participation (disaster relief and corruption reporting), communication tools for building relationships (video, instant messaging) and education (high school physics). To support the goals, we also did lots of pre-DC prep work. For goal (1), improving dissertation work: * DCs often give each student 30-ish minutes to present work and get feedback. We instructed students not just to present their work, but to ask specific questions they wanted feedback on, and to limit their presentation to 15 minutes. * We posted everyone's DC applications to a website and instructed students to read them and be ready to give their thoughts to each other. * We assigned specific faculty and student partners to be the lead feedback-givers for each student. For goal (2), cohort-building: * We posted everyone's pictures, names, and homepages on the website and instructed students to learn about each other before the DC. * We assigned shared rooms to encourage interaction throughout the conference. * We scheduled group meals, including an informal post-dinner workshop, to further increase interaction. For goal (3), integrating into the community: * We host the DC before GROUP because as a small conference, junior and senior members of the community can easily interact (in a large conference, senior members are often busy with administration and interaction with their own cohort). * We required students to present their work at the general poster session, giving more structured chances to talk to others while making their names and interests more visible. * We instructed students to prepare questions about their career goals as well as their dissertation. On balance, participants saw the DC as very positive. The main specific intellectual benefit was that PhD students often propose overly broad questions or ambitious work scopes that are too "big" for a single dissertation; the DC helped a number of students think through ways to manage this. Several students were also trying to work through choosing a specific angle of attack or theoretical lens to use in organizing their work, and here too a number of useful suggestions came out. More broadly, the DC also helped students with "what's next" questions. Two common ones were how to think about choosing careers in academia, industry, or the public sector, and how to position themselves to have an impact in the intellectual groups they care about. Work at GROUP tends to concern both technology and people, which can be hard for disciplines that focus on just tech (e.g., computer science) or people (e.g., sociology) to understand, and we talked about ways that people who cross these boundaries have succeeded. We also believe our efforts around choosing diverse participants broaden the impact of the DC, giving the cohort a wider network to draw on. Overall, the faculty panelists have done many DCs and saw this one as especially good, with much better discussion of both work and career than usual. We think this was because of the prep work and specific encouragement for students to be not just taking benefit but giving back to others. Informal student feedback was also very positive about the DC, as in this exemplar: "I have arrived back in my (icy) home of Boulder and want to sincerely thank you, Geraldine and Thomas for organizing such a fabulous DC. I gained a wealth of information (without feeling overwhelmed), was able to contribute to the information search of others, and equally as importantly, was given great validation for my work. I can already tell the friends I have made from the DC are firm and long-lasting." Participants from past GROUP DCs have gone on to successful positions in both academia and industry, and our hope is that this year's group will have similar outcomes and that the DC played a small but useful role in this.
