On Monday, I will give another version of the talk “From Inspiration to Activation: Making Online Collaborative Communities Work” that I gave at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, this time at the National Research Council Canada Institute for Information Technology in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It’s good to have another opportunity to present and get quality feedback on these ideas that have been keeping me busy for such a long time.
Abstract
Inspiration is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for collaborative communities to work. Such communities often make use of complex Internet-based tool systems. In these systems, work gets distributed over many tools, often leading to the fragmentation of communicative acts. To address this problem, explicit attention needs to be paid to community activation. We outline a conceptual model of online collaborative communities. We introduce the use of collaboration patterns for defining socio-technical design solutions for activation problems. We illustrate the approach by discussing the results from a digital class experiment. Applications ranging from e-government to scientific collaborations are discussed.
The talk will webcast live: Mon March 23, 10:30 am – noon Atlantic Daylight Time:
https://iitconnect01.iit.nrc.ca/aldodemoor
Distant participants should be able to ask questions via chat.
(The archived version of my talk is available at: https://iitconnect01.iit.nrc.ca/p14825022/)
[…] + More own research agenda Rather than having to adhere to an institutional research agenda, you can set and follow your own, personal research agenda, which you pursue in the context of your total portfolio of self-selected projects. This allows you to focus, for as long as you want and in many different settings, on the main research questions that fascinate you. In my case, one overarching question is the activation of online collaborative communities. […]