VOSS: Developing a Comparative Meta-Analytical Model for Evaluating and Facilitating Accessible CI-Enabled Virtual Organizations

由于其社会和技术的复杂性，虚拟组织只能通过协作的跨学科方法来充分理解。该项目的目的是促进对影响虚拟组织有效性的社会技术因素和动态的跨学科理解。该项目使用了十个虚拟组织的分层样本，选择它们来说明各种组织特征，包括：成员组成、规模、边界定义、功能、持续时间、起源和资金。该示例超越了科学和工程中的虚拟组织，包括各种部门中的分布式网络的不同组。该项目有三个目标：(1)对五个现有的虚拟组织进行比较混合方法的元分析，从而形成一个共识模型，用于分析、分类和评估其有效性；(2)使用另外五个现有组织的数据验证概念模型，并在整个样本上重新测试模型以探索变异性；(3)向广泛的跨学科研究界传播研究成果。这个项目将产生极其广泛的社会影响。大多数虚拟组织知识是从研究科学合作实验室和企业虚拟团队中产生的。本研究的实证样本来自社会和行为科学、政策倡导者、跨国非政府组织和公民社会网络。这种方法将鼓励在物理科学之外更广泛地传播有效的虚拟组织，并可能对社会产生重大的社会经济影响。该项目的参与者和合作伙伴代表了与不同研究人员接触的深思熟虑的尝试，并将与现有的旨在支持未被充分代表的少数民族和残疾人参与科学、技术、工程和数学学科的举措合作。该项目还通过关注网络基础设施的可访问性和通用设计，将残疾人参与虚拟组织的问题放在前台。

Because of their social and technical complexity, virtual organizations can only be understood fully through collaborative interdisciplinary approaches. The purpose of this project is to contribute to an enhanced, interdisciplinary understanding of the sociotechnical factors and dynamics influencing the effectiveness of virtual organizations. The project uses a stratified purposeful sample of ten virtual organizations, chosen to illustrate a variety of organizational characteristics, including: membership composition, size, boundary definition, function, duration, origin, and funding. The sample goes beyond virtual organizations in science and engineering to include a diverse group of distributed networks in a variety of sectors. The project has three goals: (1) to conduct a comparative mixed-methods meta-analysis of five existing virtual organizations leading to a consensual model for analyzing, categorizing, and evaluating their effectiveness; (2) to validate the conceptual model using data from five additional existing organizations, and retesting the model on the entire sample to explore variability; and (3) to disseminate the results to a broad, interdisciplinary research community. This project will have an exceptionally broad societal impact. The majority of virtual organizational knowledge has been generated from studying scientific collaboratories and corporate virtual teams. The empirical sample in this study has substantial representation from social and behavioral sciences, policy advocates, transnational non-governmental organizations, and civil society networks. This approach will encourage the broader diffusion of effective virtual organizations beyond the physical sciences and could have a substantial socioeconomic impact in society. The project participants and partners represent a deliberate attempt to engage with diverse researchers and will collaborate with existing initiatives designed to support underrepresented minority and disabled participation in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines. The project also places in the foreground issues of participation in virtual organizations by people with disabilities by focusing on accessibility of the cyberinfrastructure and universal design.