Collaboration Systems and Technologies

Groups collaborate to create value that their members cannot create through individual effort. Collaboration, however, engenders economic, interpersonal, social, political, cognitive, emotional, physical, and technical challenges. Groups can improve key outcomes using collaboration technologies, but any technology that can be used well can also be used badly; good technology does not assure successful collaboration. The value of a collaboration technology can only be realized in the larger context of a collaboration system, a combination of actors, hardware, software, knowledge, and work practices to advance groups toward their goals.

Designers of collaboration systems must therefore address many issues when creating a new collaboration system. Managers of teamwork must take into account many considerations when implementing collaboration systems and guiding groups to use them. This track features new work from researchers in many disciplines to foster a growing body of exploratory, theoretical, experimental, and applied research that could inform design and deployment choices for collaboration systems. We host papers that address individual, group, organizational, and social factors relevant to the success of people making joint efforts toward a group goal.

The papers in this track come from the range of epistemological and methodological perspectives. Behavioral science and design science papers are featured, as are exploratory, theoretical, and experimental, interpretivist and criticalist research. The track seeks to synthesize broader understandings with the variety of approaches that contributors bring to the conference.

Jay F. Nunamaker Jr.
University of Arizona
jnunamaker@cmi.arizona.edu

GJ de Vreede
University of South Florida
gdevreede@usf.edu