Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology

by Olson, Gary M.; Malone, Thomas W.; Smith, John B.; Smith, John B.

• ISBN13: 9780805834031
• ISBN10: 0805834036
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: Lawrence Erlbau

Summary

The National Science Foundation funded the first Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology initiative to look at systems that support collaborations in business and elsewhere. This book explores the global revolution in human interconnectedness. It will discuss the various collaborative workgroups and their use in technology. The initiative focuses on processes of coordination and cooperation among autonomous units in human systems, in computer and communication systems, and in hybrid organizations of both systems. This initiative is motivated by three scientific issues which have been the focus of separate research efforts, but which may benefit from collaborative research. The first is the effort to discover the principles underlying how people collaborate and coordinate work efficiently and productively in environments characterized by a high degree of decentralized computation and decision making. The second is to gain a better fundamental understanding of the structure and outputs of organizations, industries, and markets which incorporate sophisticated, decentralized information and communications technology as an important component of their operations. The third is to understand problems of coordination in decentralized or open computer systems.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Theoretical Approaches to Coordination and Collaboration	p. 5
The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination	p. 7
Communication and Collaboration in Distributed Cognition	p. 51
Coordination as Distributed Search	p. 67
Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments	p. 93
Two Design Principles for Collaboration Technology: Examples of Semiformal Systems and Radical Tailorability	p. 125
On Economies of Scope in Communication	p. 161
Knowledge, Discovery, and Growth	p. 193
Collaboration Technology for Specific Domains	p. 261
Infrastructure and Applications for Collaborative Software Engineering	p. 263
Cooperative Support for Distributed Supervisory Control	p. 311
Trellis: A Formally Defined Hypertextual Basis for Integrating Task and Information	p. 341
Problems of Decentralized Control: Using Randomized Coordination to Deal With Uncertainty and Avoid Conflicts	p. 369
The Architecture and Implementation of a Distributed Hypermedia Storage System	p. 391
Studies of Collaboration	p. 409
Communication and Coordination in Reactive Robotic Teams	p. 411
Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding: The Incremental Development of Collaborative Design Environments	p. 447
Distributed Group Support Systems: Theory Development and Experimentation	p. 473
Transforming Coordination: The Promise and Problems of Information Technology in Coordination	p. 507
Computer Support for Distributed Collaborative Writing: A Coordination Science Perspective	p. 535
Technology Support for Collaborative Workgroups	p. 559
Organizational Modeling	p. 585
Central Coordination of Decentralized Information in Large Chains and Franchises	p. 587
Organizational Performance, Coordination, and Cognition	p. 595
Computational Enterprise Models: Toward Analysis Tools for Designing Organizations	p. 623
Extending Coordination Theory to Deal With Goal Conflicts	p. 651
Modeling Team Coordination and Decisions in a Distributed Dynamic Environment	p. 673
Collaboratories	p. 711
Social Theoretical Issues in the Design of Collaboratories: Customized Software for Community Support Versus Large-Scale Infrastructure	p. 713
A Path to Concept-Based Information Access: From National Collaboratories to Digital Libraries	p. 739
Technology to Support Distributed Team Science: The First Phase of the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC)	p. 761
Author Index	p. 785
Subject Index	p. 801
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