Technology solutions such as those outlined later in this chapter can help provide group members with the awareness they need to collaborate effectively, but group members must use these tools for this to happen. Without explicit communication ( Olson and Olson, 2000) or opportunities for periodic in-person visits, remote others do not know what individuals are working on, what their roadblocks and challenges are, and how they can help or be helped ( Cramton, 2001). Research has shown that face-to-face communication is a valuable contributor to team performance ( Pentland, 2012). In addition, people working virtually with remote colleagues are often unaware of the detailed context of those colleagues' work ( Martins, Gilson, and Maynard, 2004). People working with others at distant locations are both invisible to those colleagues ( Bell and Kozlowski, 2002) and blind to their actions and situations. Many of the entries include information about the topic, the participants, the shared instruments (such as the Large Hadron Collider) if any, funding, and the type of collaboratory, based on a proposed typology. The Science of Collaboratories Database ( Olson and Olson, 2014) lists more than 717 such collaboratories, mainly in science but also in the humanities. Thus, they are typically geographically distributed, encountering all the issues outlined in this chapter in addition to those discussed earlier. To address science problems that are increasingly large and complex, collaboratories combine experts from multiple universities. In Europe, this movement is called eScience or eResearch ( Jankowski, 2009). For example, starting in the 1990s in the United States, the National Science Foundation has sponsored the development of a new organizational form for scientific collaboration called the Collaboratory ( Wulf, 1993 Finholt and Olson, 1997)-a laboratory without walls. The chapter draws on many rich case studies of large groups and organizations 1 composed of geographically distributed scientists and other professionals, which are supplemented by focused experiments and large-scale surveys and analyses of public records. The chapter ends with conclusions and recommendations. Therefore, we do not include a separate discussion of the seven features that create challenges for team science as we do in Chapters 4 through 6. This chapter focuses on addressing a single feature of team science that creates challenges. We then summarize how technology addresses some of the challenges of being geographically distributed. We then describe, in turn, the findings of the literature on how these challenges are met by the individual members of the distributed team or larger group, the team or group leaders, and the organizations that wish to support distance collaborations.īecause many of the disadvantages that arise from being distant from one's colleagues can be mitigated by various kinds of technologies, we next describe the suite of technologies available to support distance science. This chapter begins by delineating these challenges. Geographic dispersion is one of the seven features that can create challenges for team science, particularly with communication and coordination. As noted in Chapter 1, scientific publications are increasingly written by teams and larger groups across institutional boundaries ( Jones, Wuchty, and Uzzi, 2008). As science attempts to answer bigger and bigger questions, it is more and more likely that the people participating in the effort together reside in different locations, institutions, and even countries.
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