NSF Workshops on Virtual Organizations (NSF-VO)

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OCI 0751539Carl Kesselman U. of Southern CaliforniaVirtual Organizations WorkshopWe propose to organize a series of two workshops on the design, construction, evaluation, and operation of virtual organizations. The first of these workshops will focus on identifying a cross-cutting research agenda in the area of virtual organizations. The second will focus on the pragmatic issues of building and operating functional virtual organizations within the context of the deployed NSF Cyber infrastructure.Intellectual Merit.The invitees of this workshop will consist of leading researchers from the diverse disciplines who have been studying aspects of virtual organizations and distributed collaborative work as well as leading researchers within the communities that represent both current and potential members of virtual communities. In bringing together these researchers who typically do not have a forum for interacting, these workshops will help identify key research challenges, criteria for evaluation and end user requirements for virtual organizations. These results will be captured in the form of a workshop report and disseminated to the National Science Foundation and the various constituent communities. In addition, these workshops will provide an opportunity to identify new opportunities for collaboration and cross cutting research activities in the important area of virtual organizations.Broader Impacts.The Office of Cyber-infrastructure has identified virtual organizations as a fundamental element of its infrastructure plan. While there have been a variety of collaborations organized around general concept of virtual organizations, to date, no comprehensive understanding of fundamental mechanisms, infrastructure requirements, operational principles or evaluation criteria has emerged. The proposed workshops will take a critical first step in creating this understanding. As a result, the workshop reports should have a significant impact on the research and development agendas of the disciplines represented in the workshop. Furthermore, we anticipate that both the collaborations initiated by the workshop and the resulting report can have a significant impact on shaping the way virtual organizations are supported in Cyber-infrastructure, as well as obviously the effectiveness of the various user communities of a national scale cyber-infrastructure. Finally, in addition to the direct participation of women and under-represented minorities in the workshops, a significant result of virtual organizations is to remove geographic and organizational barriers to participation. To that that end, the contributions that these workshops will make to the advance the understanding and practice of virtual organizations can only serve to level the playing field and subsequently opening new opportunities for participation for all citizens.1