EAGER: Collaborative Research: Some Assembly Required: Understanding the Emergence of Teams and Ecosystems of Teams

该研究项目将开发一个理论和计算框架，以理解和实现在分布式全球环境中塑造团队组装的社会技术动态。理解和解释以人为中心的计算在团队组装中的作用的主要障碍是找到一个合适的研究环境，其中(1)地理上分布的来自潜在不同文化的个人聚集在不同规模的团队中，在不同的持续时间内完成各种任务；(2)用精确的时间戳捕获它们的动作、交互和交易；(3)他们的成果将用定义良好的指标记录下来。大型多人在线角色扮演游戏提供了一个满足所有这些要求的研究环境。《EVE Online》是一款大型多人在线角色扮演游戏，它提供了一个研究团队组合和团队生态系统的潜在合适机会。值得注意的是，它允许成千上万来自世界各地的人同时在一个服务器集群上进行互动，通过一个发达的经济系统和严肃的长期联盟，在一个比许多其他流行游戏更灵活的行动框架中。这个高风险、高回报的项目将探索使用《EVE Online》数据的可行性，以确定更普遍地解释团队聚集的社会技术和文化机制。如果成功，这项研究将作为更大规模研究的模型，这些研究除了确定组装机制外，还将评估这些机制对全球团队绩效的影响。社会上最重要、最复杂的决策都是在团队中做出的。然而，组建有效的团队是一项艰巨的任务。虽然人们已经意识到团队协作如何能够引领社会经济变革，但我们仍然缺乏关于全球分布的跨文化团队和团队系统如何组装的社会技术知识。本项目旨在解决这一限制。首先，本研究有望开启关于团队组装机制和团队生态系统的新一代理论和研究。用于开发和测试这些理论的经验数据将是一项高风险的工作，但具有前所未有的规模、规模和完整性的潜力。其次，该研究将被认为是社交网络领域第一次开发超图技术来研究团队组装和团队生态系统。本研究中开发的知识和工具将使从业者能够更有效地培养商业、科学和游戏领域的特别团队的出现和表现。它还将为其他科学学科提供新的计算统计建模方法和超图建模工具。

This research project will develop a theoretical and computational framework to understand and enable the socio-technical dynamics shaping the assembly of teams in distributed global contexts. The main barrier to understanding and explaining the role of human centered computing in team assembly is finding a suitable research environment where (1) geographically distributed individuals from potentially different cultures are assembling in teams of varying sizes to accomplish a variety of tasks over varying durations; (2) their actions, interactions and transactions are captured with precise time-stamps; and (3) their outcomes would be recorded with well-defined metrics. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games offer a research environment that meets all of these requirements. EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, offers a potentially suitable research opportunity to study the assembly of teams and ecosystems of teams. It is notable for allowing as many as tens of thousands of people to interact simultaneously on a single server cluster, from around the world, through a well-developed economic system and serious long-term coalitions, in a more flexible action framework than many other popular games possess.This high-risk high-payoff project will explore the feasibility of using data from EVE Online to identify the socio-technical and cultural mechanisms that explain the assembly of teams more generally. If successful, the study will serve as a model for larger scale studies that, in addition to identifying the assembly mechanisms also assess the impact of these mechanisms on the performance of global teams. The most important and complex decisions in society are made in teams. And yet, assembling effective teams is a daunting task. While there is an awareness of how team collaborations can spearhead socio-economic change, we still have sparse sociotechnical knowledge of how globally distributed cross-cultural teams and systems of teams are assembled. This project seeks to address this limitation. First, the proposed research offers the promise to launch a new generation of theorizing and research on the assembly mechanisms of teams and ecosystem of teams. The empirical data that will be used to develop and test these theories will be a high risk effort but with potential for unprecedented scale, size, and completeness. Second, the research will arguably be the first effort in the field of social networks to develop hypergraph techniques to study assembly of teams and ecosystems of teams.The knowledge and tools developed in this research will allow practitioners to cultivate more effectively the emergence and performance of ad hoc teams in business, science and gaming. It will also provide other scientific disciplines with new computational statistical modeling methodologies and tools to model hypergraphs.