EAGER: A socio-technical framework for identifying team science collaborations that could benefit from cyberinfrastructure

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Increasingly, research is conducted in multidisciplinary distributed teams using various cyberinfrastructure components. Understanding the creation, evolution and support of research collaborations is a crucial step in learning how to identify and nurture the research teams that will be central to future advances. This project investigates how scientific and engineering collaborations come to adopt cyberinfrastructure and identifies characteristics of collaborations that make them best suited to take advantage of cyberinfrastructure. The many ways that cyberinfrastructure is currently used in team science and the socio-technical components underlying team science collaborations will be identified. A new predictive model of the use of cyberinfrastructure by different kinds of team science collaborations will be developed and tested. Guidance on jointly assessing a collaborative team?s technology, tasks, structures and people will be provided. This research will show how scientific and engineering collaborations form and evolve allowing nascent collaborations to be assessed in terms of their readiness to form teams and successfully use cyberinfrastructure. It will enhance team science effectiveness and improve the development of appropriate cyberinfrastructure tools by identifying general classes of socio-technical needs and solutions.