Collaborative e-Managerial Support for e-Science and e-Social Science

Collaboration in global contexts is often instrumental in science advancement. Wikipedia notes that "e-Science (or eScience) is used to describe computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that used immense data sets that require grid computing." Examples include social simulations, media collections, particle physics, earth sciences, astronomy, bioinformatics, biodiversity, and epidemiology (e.g., bird-flu and SARS). Similarly, e-Social Science denotes "social science using grid computing and other IT technologies to collect, process, integrate, share, and disseminate social and behavioural data." Examples include media collections and examination of social dynamics. Epidemics (e.g., bird-flu) are examples of combined e-science and e-social science attention. Both e-science and e-social science inherently embrace a level of collaboration among stakeholders. By nature, e-science and e-social science require the formation of multi-cultural virtual teams that span the globe with collaborating distributed membership. These virtual teams enable work across distances, time zones and geographical and organizational boundaries with technologically-supported linkages. However, current initiatives (e.g., development of Cyber Infrastructure for e-Science) have given relatively little attention to the nature of support for this collaboration and requisite technology. A key differentiator of these e-science and e-social science collaborations (compared to industry teams) is that there is typically no single point of authority, making coordination and consensus formation lengthy and difficult. By nature of their distributed existence, these virtual teams are supported by communications technologies that impact group dynamics, both positively and negatively. Collaboration and Decision Technology (CDT) research over the past 15 years in virtual team contexts has provided a rich base of experience from which the unique characteristics of e-science and esocial science collaboration can be examined and subsequently supported. In this research, the researchers propose to explore the creation, application and evaluation of multi-media CDT and associated processes to support e-science and e-social science collaboration in both synchronous and asynchronous contexts. Working through already established collaborations with US NSF, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CNIC), Global Cyberbridges Project, and the CeSS (Chinese e-Social Sciences) initiatives, the researchers will evaluate this approach to ascertain aspects of efficiency and effectiveness with communities of escience and e-social science collaborators working on projects in global contexts. The researchers will explicitly analyze teams currently in progress and pilot technology currently under development. The researchers expect this research to benefit academic communities and practice through extended CDT application in supporting international e-science and e-social science.