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

该项目是对协作创建文档的微过程进行的四阶段检查，以确定哪些过程和工具特性使协作产品良好，并确定哪些新工具特性可能有助于更成功的协作。该研究包括一个探索阶段，分析和可视化围绕协作创建现有文档的活动痕迹，对使用分布式文字处理工具创建文本文档的学生团队进行系统研究，对同步和异步系统的使用进行对比实验研究，并将研究扩展到非文本文档，所有这些都是为了确定协作过程的哪些特征(例如，角色的分配或合作者之间的交接模式)与结果文档的质量相关（例如，缺乏不一致，不必要的重复或冲突的部分）。这项研究很重要，因为分布式工作在工业和科学领域已经变得无处不在，但当前的协作工作理论是在技术支持的分布式工作不太常见，并且在广泛采用协作工具开发之前产生的。本研究将扩展这些理论，包括人们使用新工具和应对距离挑战时的协作模式。研究结果将在学术出版物、帮助人们学习合作的课程以及通过与工业界的接触中传播。

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.