Collaboration Systems and Technologies

Groups collaborate to create value that their members cannot create solely 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 must therefore address multiple issues when creating a new collaboration system. Managers of teamwork must consider many factors 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 as well as interpretivist and criticalist research. The track seeks to synthesize broader understandings with the variety of approaches that contributors bring to the conference.

GJ de Vreede
Stevens Institute of Technology
GJ@stevens.edu

Sue Brown
University of Arizona
suebrown@arizona.edu