This work done with: Kevin Crowston, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University and Rolf Wigand, Departments of Information Science and Management, University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of a large-scale distributed biomedical cyberinfrastructure project and discovered that human infrastructure is shaped by a combination of both new and traditional team and organizational structures.

Our data calls into question a focus on distributed teams as the means for accomplishing distributed work and we argue for using human infrastructure as an alternative perspective for understanding how distributed collaboration is accomplished in big science.

Lee conducts research in the fields of Social Informatics, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Design Studies. In particular, she studies how designers collaborate in order to improve design processes and tools. Lee's research has investigated how designers use a variety of artifacts to coordinate their activities despite the heterogeneity of their languages, methods, and types of representations. Whereas others have described the role of standardized artifacts in coordinating activity, Lee's work describes a dynamic process of coordination in which artifacts and practices emerge and change. This work suggests how practices and artifacts are created and evolve as teams undertake non-routine work.

This presentation focuses on lessons concerning power issues. Engineers, assisted by Transcultural Observers, have learned to recognize and to respond to these issues. For this short presentation, major points on power and communication will be illustrated by short case studies.

He is a Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University. His research specialty is inter-organizational and cross-border project studies. The focus is inter-organizational relationships: acquisitions, joint ventures, strategic alliances, and outsourcing projects in which dispersed teams of engineers co-design a product or process. In these situations, strategic, technological, and economic factors are not sufficient for superior performance. Organizations further require the capability to neutralize power issues. Trans-cultural and multi-media communications are also an essential skill. He has done organization research regarding business firms, developmental organizations, and universities in Asia, Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

Download the presentation slides (PPT 7.5 MB)

The STWT employs a semi-structured modelling method to continuously visualize the proposed solutions with diagrams as well as their evolution. In a controlled experiment with 24 students, the combination of systematic facilitation and diagrams has proved as more successful than classical methods (text on cards, pin boards, or flipcharts).

Our observations in several practical cases reveal limits and potentials with respect to the enhancement of creativity. A variety of factors such as different cognitive abilities, motivation, rhythms, communication behaviour, dealing with incompleteness, varying granularity of details etc. are relevant to understand the effects on the divergence and convergence of ideas in a design workshop. It is discussed how we can support the emergence of new choices (instead of only making choices) for socio-technical solutions of collaborative work processes.

He was an Associate Professor from 1992- 2004 at the Computer Science Department at the University of Dortmund and was in charge of the development of infrastructure and new media for the University of Dortmund as a vice president from 2002-2004. He holds a PhD in Computer Science of the Technical University of Berlin (1986) and a Master of Art in Communication Science of the University of Bonn (1983).