VOSS: Micro-Analytics of Collaboration in Distributed Work: What Makes Collaboration Work

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This project is a four-phase examination of the micro-processes of collaborative creation of documents to identify what processes and tool features make the products of collaboration good and to determine what new tool features might contribute to more successful collaborations. The study includes an exploratory phase analyzing and visualizing trace of activity around the collaborative creation of existing documents, a systematic study of teams of students using distributed word processing tools to create text documents, an experimental study contrasting the use of synchronous and asynchronous systems and an extension of the study to non-textual documents, all with the goal of determining which features of collaboration processes (e.g., the distribution of roles or the handoff pattern among collaborators) correlate with quality of the resulting documents (e.g., lack inconsistencies, unnecessary repetition or conflicting sections). The study is important because distributed work has become ubiquitous in industry as well as in the sciences but current theories of collaborative work were generated when technology-supported distributed work was less common and before the development of widely-adopted collaboration tools. This study will grow these theories to include the collaboration patterns when people use new tools and cope with the challenges of being distant. Findings will be disseminated in academic publications, in classes that help people learn to collaborate and through contacts with industry.