Research Topics in Collaboration

I wanted to follow up on my Monday post about the importance of collaboration products to Skype's business strategy. The great thing about collaboration is that it is very hard. Collaboration is less a discipline than a catchall term. It's peopleware more than technology, anecdotes more than evidence. Universities have no Collaboration Studies department in schools of business, humanities, engineering, or medicine. Industry and governments study collaboration but produce narrow benefits, poorly shared.

Frankly, there's no Collaboration Science to inform the design of the next generation of tools like Skype.

Society needs it. The web needs it. I want to do it.

So what questions about collaborative behavior and collective productivity could investigations answer? Which avenues could radically improve the ability of live and time-shifted talk to become work effort? What collaboration patterns and social software designs can break down barriers and bridge teams and connect project stakeholders?

I made a list and called it Skype Journal - Research Topics in Collaboration (not attempting any creativity there). The research areas showed four themes:

• Talk is a component within larger relationships
• Talk systems are part of a larger interconnected network of information systems
• Work adds constraints that help focus conversation
• Collaboration as collective productivity

and the topics fell in three clusters:

• Getting Started (Ridiculously Easy Group Formation; Group Goal Forming; To Do Lists, Calendars, Personal Time Management, and Getting Things Done Together; Fame and Reputation)
• Being Better Together (Augmenting Inline Conversation; From Discovery to Action; Decision Making and Decision Support; Collaboration Afoot; Situational Awareness; How Collaborators Use Search and Personal/Collective memory; Gestures of Tomorrow)
• Crossing Boundaries (Intergroup Collaboration; Earning Trust and Using Whuffie; Collective Presence and Project Presence/ActivityStreams; Transparency and Collaboration; Backchannels; Scaling Collaboration from Tasks to Projects to Programmes)

It's a quick read, needs pictures and I consider this a rough, incomplete draft. The questions are a sample to get a feel for the space to be studied. 

How can we answer the questions? Research. Each topic is amenable to a different blend of usability testing, instrumented communication tools, prototyping, field ethnography of high function collaborative teams, and analysis of data from virtual teams.

I'd like to assemble a body of knowledge that turns our digital tin-cans-with-strings into engines of effectiveness.

Help me kick start this. (Yes, this is a bit self-referential.) What topics are missing? Prior art? Can this research occur in an open space or must it happen inside a corporate firewall? Of all the research topics, which ones are low-hanging fruit and which are harder to reach but outstanding value? Here's the pdf.

Skype Journal - Research Topics in Collaboration - 2009q4

 

 

 

tags: skype, microsoft, google, ge, collaboration, research, science

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Maren Hogan: What Skype means to me

On the occasion of Skype's fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me." You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com.

Maren K. Hogan is managing partner at HCI, Capital Management, for Humans.

Skype should be called Bridge, although that's not as compelling as the cool name SKYPE. But that's what it is.

It's a bridge from my children to their grandfather in New York, from my husband to his sisters and their families in Minnesota and from me to my clients around the world.

Skype creates connections between people who haven't yet met, forming bonds through facial expressions, shared chats and calls that don't break the bank. Skype also help people identify themselves as current, accessible and friendly, which is a lot for simply signing up through a service!

tags: skype, life, whatskypemeanstome

Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype.

Fons Tuinstra: What Skype means to me

On the occasion of Skype's fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me". You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com.  

Fons Tuinstra is a journalist, Internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and China-consultant in Brasschaat, Shanghai. Fons writes the China Herald and is a principal of the China Speakers Bureau, the leading speakers' agency for Greater China.

On my social networks: In the past months I have used and dumped MSN, Yahoo, QQ, LinkedIn, Seesmic, twhirl and indenti.ca. I'm still on twitter, FriendFeed, facebook, gtalk and use ping.fm. My phone numbers tend to change each six months. The only stable force over the past dynamic years has been Skype. It keeps on humming in the background, while I subscribe to other social networks and related tools. And dump them again, of course.

tags: skype, stories, whatskypemeanstome, china, fonstuinstra, chinaspeakersbureau, socialnetworks, journalism, reporting

Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype.