VOSS: Coordination in Virtual Organizations

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Virtual organizations are becoming increasingly important in driving production and innovation. Online production groups have the potential to transform the way that knowledge is produced and disseminated, but are often plagued with coordination problems that exceed those encountered by comparable co-located groups. Coordination is especially challenging for organizations engaged in complex, interdependent tasks typical of science and engineering. These groups often involve large numbers of contributors with tenuous and poorly defined relationships to the virtual organization and each other, who must coordinate to create coherent knowledge artifacts. For example, the volunteer editors who write Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, must produce a collection of articles that are complete, accurate, coherent and readable. To solve these coordination challenges groups use a variety of mechanisms, including market bidding, standardization, strong leadership, and direct communication. This project seeks to understand the effectiveness of particular coordination mechanisms for solving the coordination challenges faced by online production groups. The research will examine how online production groups use a variety of coordination mechanisms to solve problems of task assignment, temporal dependencies and fit between work outputs. It will examine the conditions under which these coordination mechanisms are successful in existing online knowledge production communities, such as Wikipedia and the thousands of other wikis that use a similar infrastructure. The effectiveness of these coordination mechanisms will then be tested in controlled online experiments, using artificial production groups recruited to synthesize information into coherent knowledge. This research extends theories of coordination to large scale virtual organizations, providing a greater understanding of how large groups of individuals can effectively work together online. The results will help virtual organizations to more effectively coordinate, engage participants in tasks that are important to the group, and coherently synthesize knowledge.