Electronic Collaboration and Collaboratories: Principles and Applications

Roger L. Caldwell, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85719
Originally prepared in June 2000 for University of Arizona Medical Ignorance Collaboratory, Directed by Marlys Witte
Revised in January 2008 by identifying this content as a separate page and addition of history section

Introduction

Electronic collaboration and collaborates have wide use today. The following five principles are designed to govern collaboratories (broadly defined) which allow multiple parties (regardless of where they are or their discipline or the organization) to work on projects of common interest. In a nutshell, a collaboratory has three primary parts -- people, information, and tools.

There is a brief history of electronic collaboration at the end of the principles and applications sections.

Principles

1. Involve others without regard to their location. Barriers of distance, organization, discipline, or level of expertise are removed. Interaction can be in real time (synchronous) or at the convenience of the user (asynchronous).

2. Provide group interaction tools. These would include joint editing and review, shared project libraries or knowledge summaries, shared specialized equipment, ease of finding and reformatting information, flexibility to meet personal needs, and ease of use. These tools also allow new participants to join and quickly review the project background and progress.

3. Recognize that communicating in new ways requires new perspectives. It takes time to become accustomed to the techniques involved, the role of working with others remotely, and learning to focus on the specific project when everyone has other distractions in their own different settings.

4. Share specialized resources and decision making roles. Not all sites approach a project in the same way or have access to similar resources. By collaborating, everyone can gain access to the resources and also see how different approaches can be used to reach the same goals. And, all the participants can be involved in the direction of the project.

5. Assume there is no one best method of collaboration. Different projects and different mixes of people will cause things to be done differently. As long as basic principles are met, this is good. But, finding the right mix of activities and approaches for a particular group will take time.

Applications - Collaboratories are good choices when the following conditions are met:

1. The participants are from different locations and organizations but focus on a project of common interest.

2. The project lends itself to multiple approaches, multiple smaller projects, or a large number of participants.

3. Participants are made to feel full partners in the project. This can be done by allowing them to discuss and guide project direction (within the project goals). Project discussions and results are automatically maintained for easy access by everyone, so everyone can have full access to all parts of the project, if they wish to read everything.

4. Everyone is willing to try a different approach. It will take time to become comfortable with this approach. It is likely the available communications equipment for each participant will not be consistently good or has never been optimized for this use. Paying attention to these small details makes for a more successful project.

History

Electronic collaboration began with the telegraph and telephone and grew substantially when internet (as ARPANET in1969) provided email capabilities across a broad section of users (1). In 1975 the EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System was developed by Murray Turoff from trials as an information management process for large scale emergencies (2). It was the an early computer conferencing system and the first example of "groupware", a term coined in 1978 by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz (3). The appearance of Usenet (NNTP) in 1979 provided a lot of individual and distributed discussion forums through internet (4). The growth of personal computers beginning In the 1980s expanded the availability of email and computer mediated communications (another term to describe the role of computers and their software in communication). By 2000 there were many examples of software that performed these functions, some of it specialized and some as part of larger software suits, some operated through centrally stored data bases and some from locally stored databases and shared or synchronized with others. Today there are many examples, including a series of community based solutions such as blogs.

Collaboratories became a "place" where people could communicate electronically (or virtually as we would say today as people could be in different places and time zones) as well as face to face meetings where one could collaborate electronically (anonymously, for example) or verbally. The term "collaboratory" was proposed by William Wolf in 1989 and is defined as: "a center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries” (5,6).

All of these collaboration methods have similarities and differences from the old fashioned face-to-face collaboration. Which method of communication is most appropriate depends on the situation. I began my experiences with electronic collaboration with EIES in 1980 and have used a number of different types of software for a variety of purposes and participants since that time.

Citations
1. Internet Society. Viewed Jamnary 14, 2008 - www.isoc.org/internet/history/
2. Wikiworld on the EIES Legacy. Viewed January 14, 2008 - wikiworld.com/wiki/index.php/EIES_Legacy
3. Johnson-Lenz, Peter and Trudy. Viewed January 14, 2008 - johnson-lenz.com
4. Wikipedia on Usenet. Viewed January 14, 2008 - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
5. Wikipedia on Collaboration. Viewed January 14, 2008 - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration
6. Wikipedia on Collaboratory. Viewed January 14, 2008 - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboratory