Supporting sustained collaboration over time in hybrid collocated and online settings

• Applicant: Dr. Alexander Nolte
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: from 2017 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 351484012

The inevitable distribution of knowledge and the increasingly common geographic disparity of people has led to a shift in collaboration models towards distributed collaboration in recent years. Technologies such as Skype, Google Documents, and Wikis have been created with the aim of supporting such distributed collaboration scenarios. Yet, these technologies miss the richness of face-to-face collaboration, which results in challenges such as lower group awareness and higher effort to establish common ground as compared to collocated settings. In response to this challenge, a new hybrid collaboration paradigm has emerged, which intertwines collocated and distributed collaboration. Examples of such hybrid settings are collocated events that cover specific topics like the Wikipedia Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon, which aims at getting more female editors interested in the Wikipedia community. Similarly, in the context of process management, there are approaches that intertwine face-to-face workshop meetings with phases of asynchronous distributed collaboration. The goals of these approaches are to allow people to reflect on workshop results and to involve people that were not present during workshops in order to improve collaboration outcomes as well as to increase participation. While this model of hybrid collaboration has been successful, research on such settings is still sparse and results have not been conclusive. Furthermore, research in this field mainly focuses on short term contributions and does not consider sustained participation and collaboration over time. This project aims to fill this gap by answering the following open research question: What processes and tools can support the transition and interaction between collocated and online collaboration to promote sustainable collaboration and contribution over time? In order to answer this question, we will identify and study factors that either promote or hinder the transition between collocated and online collaboration in two distinct, yet related, settings that involve phases of collocated collaboration followed by phases of asynchronous online collaboration. Based upon these factors, we will develop a socio-technical approach that combines technological support and organizational means to support organizers and participants of collocated events to facilitate the transition between collocated and online collaboration. In the end, we aim to formulate a comprehensive theoretical framework about the Sustainability of Collaboration over Time (SCoT) in different contexts, such as different locations, team sizes, means of communication, and technological affordances, and develop approaches and tools that support participants and organizers in successfully orchestrating collaborative activities. Results from this research will bring existing collaboration approaches together and will support online production communities such as Wikipedia as well as globally distributed teams.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professorin Dr. Rosta Farzan