VOSS: Coordination in Virtual Organizations

虚拟组织在推动生产和创新方面变得越来越重要。在线生产小组具有改变知识生产和传播方式的潜力，但往往受到协调问题的困扰，这些问题比同处一地的类似小组所遇到的问题更严重。对于从事复杂、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。这些组通常涉及大量的贡献者，他们与虚拟组织之间以及彼此之间的关系都很脆弱且定义不清，他们必须协调以创建一致的知识工件。例如，撰写在线百科全书维基百科的志愿编辑必须编写完整、准确、连贯和可读的文章集合。为了解决这些协调挑战，团体使用各种机制，包括市场招标、标准化、强有力的领导和直接沟通。本项目旨在了解解决在线生产集团所面临的协调挑战的特定协调机制的有效性。该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、时间依赖和工作产出之间的匹配问题。它将考察这些协调机制在现有的在线知识生产社区（如维基百科和其他使用类似基础设施的数千个wiki）中取得成功的条件。然后，这些协调机制的有效性将在受控的在线实验中得到检验，使用人工生产小组来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，提供了对大型个人群体如何有效地在线合作的更好理解。结果将有助于虚拟组织更有效地协调，参与对小组重要的任务，并连贯地综合知识。

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.