VOSS: Supporting Interpersonal Awareness in Multicultural Virtual Organizations

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。该奖项的研究目标是考虑人们如何在地理分布的个人之间的多元文化合作中管理他们的注意力。？虚拟组织? ?跨越地理和机构界限的个人、设施和资源的集合？允许大量人员跨越地理、时间和文化障碍进行合作，以实现重要的社会目标。尽管虚拟组织有很多优点，但人们很难在远距离有效地协同工作。大多数虚拟组织都包括通信工具，例如即时消息、电子邮件，甚至实时视频会议。但是，由于虚拟组织的成员不知道周围有谁，也不知道自己是否忙，所以他们可以？他们有效地使用这些工具与同事协调工作。该奖项考虑了在虚拟组织中管理注意力的问题，在虚拟组织中，人们必须与一组文化上不同的远程合作伙伴进行协作。这项工作解决了在这些组织中支持意识信息的三个关键问题：1)人们如何评估他人？可用性，以及他们自己希望向他人提供什么可用性线索？2)如何在感知工具中支持这些过程，无论是桌面使用还是在移动环境中使用？3)如何支持这些过程，使工具被全球组织的不同成员所接受？这些问题是通过工具开发、调查和访谈研究以及受控实验室研究的结合来解决的。这项工作建立在人际意识和促进地理分布群体非正式互动领域的大量研究以及分布群体的意识和注意力的基础上。这项工作提供了四个独特的贡献：(a)将实证行为研究与技术设计和实施相结合，从而使技术和理论直接相互告知；(b)理解和利用分布群体中文化上适当的注意行为，以增强我们对人类行为的理解；(c)建立和评价在地理上分散的群体中相互作用的新技术；(d)考虑意识和注意力工具如何满足多元文化劳动力的需求。这项工作将导致新的理论和工具，将改善所有类型的虚拟组织的协作。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The research objective of this award is to consider how people manage their attention in multi-cultural collaborations between geographically distributed individuals. ?Virtual organizations??aggregations of individuals, facilities and resources that span geographic and institutional boundaries?allow large numbers of people to collaborate across geographic, temporal and cultural barriers to achieve important societal goals. Despite the advantages of virtual organizations, it can be difficult for people to work effectively together at a distance. Most virtual organizations include communication tools, such as instant messaging, email, and even real time video conferencing. But because virtual organization members lack awareness of who is around and whether or not they are busy, they can?t use these tools effectively to coordinate their work with colleagues. This award considers the issue of managing attention in virtual organizations in which people must collaborate with a culturally heterogeneous set of remote partners. The work addresses three critical issues for the support of awareness information in these organizations: 1) How do people assess others? availability, and what cues to availability do they themselves wish to provide others? 2) How can these processes be supported in awareness tools, both for desktop use and for use in mobile environments? And 3) how can these processes be supported in a way that tools will be accepted by the diverse membership of global organizations? These questions are addressed through a combination of tool development, survey and interview research, and controlled laboratory studies. This work builds on substantial research in the area of interpersonal awareness and fostering informal interaction in geographically distributed groups and on awareness and attention in distributed groups. The work provides four unique contributions: (a) integrating empirical behavioral research with technology design and implementation, such that technology and theory inform each other directly; (b) understanding and harnessing culturally appropriate attentional behaviors in distributed groups to enhance our understanding of human behavior; (c) building and evaluating novel technologies for interaction in geographically distributed groups; and (d) considering how awareness and attention tools can meet the needs of a culturally diverse workforce. The work will lead to new theories and tools that will improve collaboration in virtual organizations of all types.