Designing Virtual Organizations for Impact and Sustainability: Exploring a Resource-Use-Impact Planning Model

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Increasingly, virtual organizations are being formed to undertake science and engineering research, but with mixed success. This project creates a resource-based framework for planning and evaluating virtual organization development efforts and explores the role that this framework can play in enhancing virtual organization success. The resource-based framework helps identify whether a virtual organization will be able to successfully create and mobilize shared resources through voluntary individual action to leverage the support of external stakeholders and have significant impacts within and beyond the virtual organization itself. This project bridges the gap between social science research, infrastructure design, and management planning and evaluation. The framework draws attention to the nature of the resources and the support needed to create and maintain virtual organizations, the activities that participants will engage in and the expected impacts of the virtual organization, including how these impacts will be made visible to participants and to external stakeholders. Interactions between these three areas are also investigated. The proposed framework will be developed, refined, and tested through a combination of interviews, case studies, and usability exercises undertaken with virtual organization leaders and developers.Creation of science-informed guidelines for virtual organization design and evaluation is a crucial step in developing cyberinfrastructure-supported virtual organizations that are more sustainable and have a broader impact on the team science efforts underway at many government agencies, non-profits, businesses and NGOs. Developing a tool for virtual organization planning and evaluation will have a profound impact, allowing technology to bring together a wide range of resources to solve critical problems and address fundamental questions. In addition, under-represented groups and minority institutions can more easily participate in virtual organizations engaged in scientific and engineering collaborations.