RCN: Digital Society and Technologies Research Coordination Network

Syracuse University, Syracuse NY

Investigators

Abstract

This Research Coordination Network will employ a series of workshops, seminars and other capacity-building activities to build out a "lightweight" (i.e., minimally burdensome or constraining, widely accessible and appreciated) network organization whose participants seek to advance the design, adoption and impact of digital technologies through sociotechnical research. A key product associated with the network will be a cyberinfrastructure that enables deposit and retrieval of useful assets (e.g., ideas, documents, data) for studying, designing and managing sociotechnical systems. The community-building and research-initiating goals of the RCN are to be achieved through at least 33 workshops across five years of the effort. The workshops will engage scholars and practitioners from a wide range of fields and professional societies that address sociotechnical issues in knowledge sharing. The workshop conversations will enable diffusion of state-of-the-art findings and tools across disciplines and domains. They will also encourage communities of researchers to collaborate across academic silos and to address questions related to pressing problems in sociotechnical practice. Thus, broader impacts will include both a shared research cyberinfrastructure and enhanced evidence bases for improved sociotechnical practice. Understanding how technologically mediated work is best accomplished, which is the focus of this RCN, is of great importance both to the scientific community and to nurturing a national innovation ecosystem that will enhance national competitiveness and security. Scholarly research in this domain is currently fragmented so could benefit greatly from integration and from diffusion of knowledge, techniques and tools across disciplinary boundaries.