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Dear Colleagues:
NSF has recently issued its latest solicitation on Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems. Proposals are due 25 January, 2010.
A brief synopsis is provided below.
A link for further information and the link to the solicitation itself are provided here:
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503256&org=NSF&sel_org=NSF&from=fund
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10504/nsf10504.pdf
This is a wonderful opportunity for US-based social scientists working on topics pertinent to virtual organizations, broadly construed. A synopsis and list of some potential topics is provided below. These should not be construed as complete lists. Additional pertinent research topics are welcome, so long as the work would yield sound, generalizable advances in knowledge.
We look forward to receiving your strong proposals.
Feel free to distribute this notice widely.
Best regards On Behalf of The VOSS Program Management Team,
Jacqueline Meszaros, Ph.D.
Program Director, Social and Economic Sciences, National Science Foundation
VOSS Synopsis
The Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) program supports fundamental scientific research, particularly advances in social, organizational and design science, directed at advancing the understanding of how to develop effective virtual organizations and under what conditions virtual organizations can enable and enhance scientific, engineering, and education production and innovation.
The intellectual challenges and institutional conditions of 21st century science and engineering necessitate collaboration. There has been a growing shift away from traditions of individual based science toward more collaborative models. In many fields, scholars are confronted with challenges of a scale and complexity that defy the boundaries of traditional fields as well as the limits of individual capacity, thus requiring more diversified and at the same time unified participation from researchers. Many scientists and engineers find themselves today working in collaborations, many of which cross disciplinary, institutional, and geographic borders via the support of cyberinfrastructure. The complex social and technical processes underlying successful virtual organizations as applied to science and engineering have yet to be fully elucidated.
The VOSS solicitation directly supports projects aimed at effectively promoting and leveraging the extension and integration of past research to improve our understanding of the sociotechnical conditions under which new forms of virtual organizations are effective in science, engineering, and learning. VOSS funded research must be grounded in theory and rooted in empirical methods. It must produce broadly applicable and transferable results that augment knowledge and practice of virtual organizations as a modality. VOSS supported projects that use functioning organizations as data sources are encouraged, but should be designed such that the findings extend beyond that unit and sample. Projects that develop or build on research perspectives that cross disciplinary lines are strongly encouraged. Research methods may span a broad variety of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Critical challenges and prominent themes that scientific inquiries might address under VOSS may include (but are not limited to):
· Individual and collective motivation: What are the social and technological barriers to and/or enablers of participation in a virtual organization? What are the social and technological forces of coordination, competition, and/or collaboration? How do these forces vary across task, domain, population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
· Organizational structure, scope, and scaling: Are there levels of connectivity, diversity, and interactivity at which scientific production and innovation can be optimized in virtual organizations? How does optimization on these dimensions vary across task, domain, population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
· Organizational life cycles: What are the stages and causes of virtual organization evolution, including, for example, formation of new organizations, organizational change or transformation, and organizational crisis or decline? How do they vary across task, domain, population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
· Production and innovation: What technological, social, and legal arrangements support intellectual production and innovation in virtual organizations? How do these arrangements interact? How do they vary across task, domain, population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
· Management, Governance, and Leadership: What are models of governance agreement, and what should they address? How do they interact with the cultures, structures and arrangements governing the participating individuals and institutions? How do virtual organizations and participants understand, negotiate, and prioritize multiple and what might be conflicting memberships?
· Measurement and assessment: What are the tests of efficiency, equity, and effectiveness that can be applied to different types of virtual organizations? How do these conditions vary across task, domain, population, and/or stage of organization lifecycle?
· Units and frameworks of analysis-both social and technical: Social units of analysis may be individuals, teams, scientific disciplines, individual or multiple organizations. Technical units of analysis may include specific tools or objects, virtual or immersive environments or "worlds," specialized niches, or collections of such virtual environments. What are the conceptual and comparative frameworks of analyzing virtual organizations? What theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches can be applied, what need to be adapted, what need to be developed?
· Comparative performance: Under what conditions do virtual organizations outperform co-located organizations? What tasks or processes can be done or done better by virtual organizations that cannot be done or done as well in co-located organizations, and vice versa? What are the advantages and disadvantages of technological-mediation? Under what conditions (and how) might virtual organizations be instrumented to advance our understanding of certain phenomena better than co-located organizations?