Track: Collaboration Systems and Technology
Minitrack: Processes and Systems for Collaboration Support

Recent data show that collaboration is a key driver of performance in organizations. The impact of collaboration on organizational performance is more critical than strategic orientation or market and technological turbulence. Yet successful collaboration does not come without difficulty. Groups and teams need to overcome collaboration challenges such as groupthink, dominance, lack of efficiency and lack of focus. Successful collaboration requires support based on purposeful guidance and interventions to create groups and teams, to design and deploy processes, to design and deploy technology, to support leaders or facilitators, and to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of information processing. The challenge for researchers and practitioners alike is to design sustainable processes and systems within and between organizations that allow people, groups and teams to collaborate successfully. This challenge has many dimensions, including a technical, a behavioral, a social, an emotional, an economical, and a political. This minitrack invites papers that address the design and deployment of collaboration processes and systems within and between organizations, groups, and teams.

This minitrack provides one of the key international platforms on which the following issues can be discussed:

• Facilitation methods, techniques, patterns, and thinkLets to support and improve (a)synchronous collaboration between co-located and distributed people, teams, or groups.

• The design, application, and evaluation of collaboration support technologies; G(D)SS, groupware and meeting support technology.

• Collaboration Engineering and the design, codification and reuse of work practices and pattern languages for group collaboration to create self-sustaining collaboration support in organizations.

• Theoretical foundations and practical approaches to model and design high quality collaborative work practices.
   

Thus, papers are welcome that contain original ideas on systematic modeling, analysis, design and evaluation of group collaboration processes and systems. There are no preferred methodological stances for this minitrack: this minitrack is open to both qualitative and quantitative research, to research from a positivist, interpretivist, or critical perspective, to studies from the lab, from the field, or developmental in nature.

Themes and topics of relevance to this minitrack include, but are not limited to :

Collaboration support techniques, systems and processes

• Understanding patterns of collaboration, e.g.:

• Studies on the effectiveness and measurement of different techniques for producing predictable patterns of collaboration: generation (brainstorming), reduction (selecting which ideas are worthy of more attention), clarification (creation of shared meaning) organization, evaluation, and consensus building

• Creativity techniques

• Reusability, transferability and predictability of collaboration processes

• ThinkLets, best practices and patterns – development, field experiences, laboratory evaluation of codified facilitation interventions that produce a predictable pattern of collaboration

• Further advances of and experiences with Collaboration Engineering approaches

Design approaches for collaboration processes systems & technologies

• Theories, guidelines and strategies for designing collaboration processes, technologies and systems

• Enhancing robustness, flexibility and longevity of these systems, processes and technologies

• Modeling techniques and frameworks to capture collaboration process designs, facilitation interventions and information exchange in groups

• Theoretical foundations of productivity, creativity, satisfaction, and other constructs relating to mission-critical tasks for which collaboration processes and systems must be designed

• Proof of concepts – examples of breakthrough collaboration technologies, processes and systems e.g.

• Group processes for requirements specification & analysis

• Collaborative risk management

• Focus groups

• Delphi processes

• Collaborative planning

• Strategy building

• Evaluation & assessment

• Collaborative writing
   

Collaboration Technology Adoption, Adaptation, and Transition

• Training work group members and work group leaders

• Change management in collaborative contexts

• Coping with resistance to change in collaborative contexts

• Success factors for collaborative technology diffusion

• Theories for technology acceptance, use, and diffusion

• Studies on the efficacy of interventions intended to introduce collaborative technologies in an organization

Facilitation of group work

• Predictable effects of facilitation interventions

• Styles of facilitation

• Embedding facilitation support in groupware technology

• Facilitation of dispersed group processes

• Approaches to training facilitation skills to novices and practitioners

• Facilitation guidelines for different socio-cultural environments

• Approaches to capturing (un)successful facilitation techniques from expert facilitators

• Ethical issues around facilitation
   

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten (Primary Contact)
Delft University of Technology
Technology Policy and Management
Department of Systems Engineering
Jaffalaan 5, 2628BX, Delft, the Netherlands
Phone: +31-15-27-83-567
Fax: +31-15-27-83-429
E-mail: g.l.kolfschoten@tudelft.nl

Gert-Jan de Vreede
University of Nebraska at Omaha & Delft University of Technology
Center for Collaboration Science
1110 South 67th street, Omaha, NE 68182-0116
Phone: 402-554-2026
Fax: 402-554-3400
E-mail: gdevreede@mail.unomaha.edu

Robert O. Briggs
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Academic Affairs, Center for Collaboration Science
Roskens Hall Room 512B, Omaha, NE 68182
Phone: 402-554-2972
Fax: 402-554 2853