VOSS: Collaborative Research: Sharing Insights Across Multiple Virtual Organizations

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Collaboration through virtual organizations is crucial for analyzing and tackling problems such as preventing terrorists, understanding business risks, tracing outbreaks of disease, and conducting criminal investigations. Nonetheless, these collaborations can fail to connect the dots for lack of a technological and organizational framework for leveraging large amounts of dynamic shared information collaboratively. A key research question is how to support the ability of collaborating organizations to attend to and follow up on scattered and often unexpected information from different sources. This research will gain a fundamental understanding of inter-organizational collaborative investigative analysis. The investigators are conducting interviews with members of virtual organizations and controlled laboratory studies to examine interventions that might increase information use across organizational boundaries, and developing and evaluating tools to accomplish these interventions. The research contributes in three areas: (a) understanding how analytical processes across organizational boundaries are evidenced in how people make use of shared but unexpected information, (b) understanding the benefits and costs of different methods for managing collaborative analysis in an environment of large amounts of dynamic information, and (c) designing and testing the effectiveness of interfaces that provide information to support emergent attention and responsibility taking in a multi-organizational collaboration. This project will inform collaborative investigative analysis in fields such as criminal justice, intelligence, science, and epidemiology. The results could lead to new visualization tools for analysts in these areas, recommendations for organizational practices to improve the quality of collaborative analysis, new methods for training professional analysts to solve complex, interconnected problems, and learning tools for graduate programs in fields such as intelligence and epidemiological analysis and criminal justice. The research will also involve undergraduate and graduate students, and will result in their further training and education in interdisciplinary research.