VOSS: Coordination in Virtual Organizations

虚拟组织在推动生产和创新方面正变得越来越重要。在线生产集团有可能改变知识的生产和传播方式，但经常受到协调问题的困扰，这些问题超过了可比的共处一地的集团所遇到的问题。对于从事复杂的、相互依赖的科学和工程任务的组织来说，协调尤其具有挑战性。这些小组通常涉及大量贡献者，这些贡献者与虚拟组织以及彼此之间的关系薄弱且定义不明确，他们必须进行协调以创建一致的知识构件。例如，撰写在线百科全书维基百科的志愿者编辑必须提供完整、准确、连贯和可读的文章集。为了解决这些协调挑战，小组使用了各种机制，包括市场招标、标准化、强有力的领导和直接沟通。本项目旨在了解特定协调机制在解决在线生产小组面临的协调挑战方面的有效性。这项研究将考察在线生产小组如何使用各种协调机制来解决任务分配、时间依赖和工作输出之间的匹配问题。它将研究这些协调机制在哪些条件下在现有的在线知识生产社区取得成功，例如维基百科和使用类似基础设施的数千个其他维基。然后，这些协调机制的有效性将在受控在线实验中进行测试，使用招募的人工生产小组将信息合成为连贯的知识。这项研究将协调理论扩展到大型虚拟组织，为更好地理解大型个人群体如何在网上有效地合作提供了更多的理解。结果将帮助虚拟组织更有效地协调，让参与者参与对组织重要的任务，并一致地合成知识。

Virtual organizations are becoming increasingly important in driving production and innovation. Online production groups have the potential to transform the way that knowledge is produced and disseminated, but are often plagued with coordination problems that exceed those encountered by comparable co-located groups. Coordination is especially challenging for organizations engaged in complex, interdependent tasks typical of science and engineering. These groups often involve large numbers of contributors with tenuous and poorly defined relationships to the virtual organization and each other, who must coordinate to create coherent knowledge artifacts. For example, the volunteer editors who write Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, must produce a collection of articles that are complete, accurate, coherent and readable. To solve these coordination challenges groups use a variety of mechanisms, including market bidding, standardization, strong leadership, and direct communication.This project seeks to understand the effectiveness of particular coordination mechanisms for solving the coordination challenges faced by online production groups. The research will examine how online production groups use a variety of coordination mechanisms to solve problems of task assignment, temporal dependencies and fit between work outputs. It will examine the conditions under which these coordination mechanisms are successful in existing online knowledge production communities, such as Wikipedia and the thousands of other wikis that use a similar infrastructure. The effectiveness of these coordination mechanisms will then be tested in controlled online experiments, using artificial production groups recruited to synthesize information into coherent knowledge. This research extends theories of coordination to large scale virtual organizations, providing a greater understanding of how large groups of individuals can effectively work together online. The results will help virtual organizations to more effectively coordinate, engage participants in tasks that are important to the group, and coherently synthesize knowledge.