Gestaltung internetbasierter kollaborativer Team- und Projektarbeit

In order to support team and project work in companies, Internet-based collaboration software tools are increasingly being used. These software tools enable employees located within and outside the organization to communicate, share knowledge and data, and organize projects. Whether these benefits can be actualized depends on how the collaboration software is designed. As an orientation for the effective use of collaboration software tools, the present paper presents a design model for spatially distributed collaborative work and demonstrates its suitability based on a practical example. Therefore, we exemplarily show design activities and problems of the practical example and locate them within the model. Despite an extensive technical acumen and diverse design work, we identify problems with the use of collaboration tools. They focus on five problem areas: (1) parallel use of collaboration software tools, (2) transparency in terms of change, (3) the high rate of virtual meetings, (4) the onboarding process, and (5) the dilemma between the daily business and the implementation of internal IT projects.     

Addressing Barriers to University-Community Collaboration

Abstract

University-community partnerships, and COPC programs in particular, offer important opportunities for traditionally segregated groups to work together in collaborative relationships. The challenge of bringing people who possess distinct differences in background and social power together is a long-standing issue. Class, status, and organizational differences may impede collaboration. This article discusses the history of COPC as social policy and reviews an evaluation report of successful community-university partnerships. Drawing from the community organizing literature in sociology and social work, this article suggests community organizing methods that address structural obstacles to collaborative work. Especially in COPC programs characterized by multiple interactions, it is the community based organization (CBO) which has greatest facility to equalize the playing field between disparate groups. The role of community organizers in CBOs is to acknowledge and disrupt the structural inequalities inherent in these relationships. The community organizer must resist the role of expert or buffer between the community and university and instead strive toward authentic collaboration.     

Power Mapping: Enhancing Sociological Knowledge by Developing Generalizable Analytical Public Tools

In this article, I argue for and illustrate ‘power mapping’ as a concrete research approach that can benefit specific publics while enhancing professional sociological knowledge and theory. I present power mapping as an example of a more broad approach to public sociology which seeks to harness sociological theory and knowledge in order to create generalizable analytical tools that social movements, policy makers, concerned citizens, voluntary associations, and community organizations can use to develop their own strategic assessments of the sociological contexts in which they act. One of the ironies of the current discussion of public sociology is that it has been conducted in an abstract, hyper-theoretical discourse which is precisely one of the factors that has disconnected so much sociology from general publics. In this article, I instead turn towards presenting a specific concrete research strategy which could engender mutually beneficial research collaboration and dialogue between sociologists and specific publics.     

Moving Toward Collaboration

Summary

Traditionally, organizations serving children and families have focused service delivery by available funding stream criteria. Federal funding streams supported fragmented services by tightly channeling monies to specific programs for specific needs. The intensity of providing and improving the delivery of services has overshadowed building connectedness across organizations and systems. Service has been the major goal and intense effort has gone into maximizing opportunities and measuring effects through service frequency. Over the past several years, new funding incentives have provided the opportunity for new collaboratives. This article describes an innovative collaboration between the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) and Eastern Washington University (EWU) and the unique directions and support that a university/agency partnership can provide for both organizations. Key features of this collaboration include shifts in funding and staffing strategies that contributed to more flexible services and increased levels of collaboration between IDHW, EWU and other community and state organizations and institutions. This article describes how funding can be viewed as a tool to increase the level of collaboration between systems, thus potentially leading to a breakdown of the traditional service delivery system. Finally, this article describes how an agency/higher education partnership played a key role in documenting the success of a school based program in meeting the emergency assistance needs of children and families, and how program evaluation, like funding requirements, can provide a supportive role in building collaborative relationships.     

Institutional Determinants of Collaboration: An Empirical Study of County Open-Space Protection

Collaboration is an increasingly important topic in the publicadministration and management literatures. A preponderance ofstudies focuses on how managers can build trust between thegovernment and collaborative partners by means of behavioralattributes and managerial skill. In this article, the authorsuggests that stable institutions and local government structurefacilitate collaboration by allowing public managers to morecredibly commit in a policy arena. Using county data on open-spacepolicy, the author finds empirical support for the propositionthat county form of government, along with rules governing debtaccumulation and administrative commitment, increases the breadthof county collaboration in open-space protection.     

(Re)visualizing women who use drugs

This article explores a collaborative, community-based project that fuses both arts-based feminist and visual sociological perspectives through a collaboration with five women in leadership roles in a drug user union, Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). VANDU is situated in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada’s poorest urban neighbourhood. Through writing, photography and collage-making, participants in this study resisted dominant representations of women who use criminalised drugs by focusing on activism, family, friends and the spaces they live and work in. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical and feminist scholarship interested in using creative and visual methodologies and collaborative community artworks as tools for developing alternate perspectives about the lives of marginalised women.     

Towards interprofessionality in developing family mediation in Finland

Collaboration crossing professional and organizational boundaries is promoted, but also considered difficult and uncalled for. The aim of this study is to advance the comprehension of inter-professional collaboration on boundaries as a resource for learning and change. I examine and trace the initial shapes of interprofessionality and learning in two separate learning networks of a project researching, developing and learning family mediation in Finland. The naturally occurring data consists of transcribed audio-taped talk between practitioners (e.g. social workers, family counsellors, psychologists and judges) at the beginning of their collaborative work. The qualitative analysis detected communicative patterns, disruptions and dialogical learning mechanisms. The results interpreted through Cultural-Historical Activity Theory show that although the two quite similarly composed learning networks were given the same tasks, they differed on emerging learning mechanisms and unfolding dialogues. If collaboration is intended to be inter-professional and lead to change, there is a need to actively create shared tools, such as models, that enable transformative dialogue. For social work education inter-professional collaboration poses a challenge: how can education concurrently promote both learning the boundaries of social work and learning how to inter-professionally cross them?     

Constructing collaborative processes through experiential learning: Participatory planning in Kaymaklı, Turkey

Prevalent discussions in urban planning focus on collaboration. However, they do not explain the underlying processes that allow collaborative work. This paper argues that experiential learning processes can help construct and maintain collaborative platforms in urban planning. To show this, the paper uses the participatory planning of Kaymaklı, a small agricultural and touristic town in the internationally well-known cultural landscape, the Cappadoccia region. This entails the second stage of a two-year long Participatory Action Research project initiated by a local civil association in collaboration with the Municipality of Kaymaklı. The paper presents how the local capacity for collaboration is built through the development of local knowledge in a practice-based training programme. The attention is particularly directed to the pedagogic design of the training programme, the shared knowledge that came out of it, the affects of the programme on the collaborative capacity of participants, and their future collaborative action.     

Invisible computer for collaborative design: evaluation of a multimodal sketch-based environment

In the areas of design, especially in architectural design, collaboration has become an important challenge. The specialization of skills increase, work teams are more and more extensive and the geographic distance between them increases too. The economic and ecological stakes related to remote collaboration are an evidence. This context involves the need to support most efficiently possible remote working meetings. We present the Distributed Collaborative Digital Studio (DSDC), a tool designed to recreate, in distant situations, the context of copresence meetings. This shared environment is created in the "invisible computer" approach [11]. The idea is that the tool should disappear from user's consciousness. Indeed, creative design activities require some fluidity in their process. Therefore, any involuntary interruption created by the system can potentially brake creativity. In this perspective, we investigate specifically the "invisibility" of our environment. To do this, we propose a framework for the operationalization of the concept and a methodology to test the system invisibility. This methodology was applied through a case study consisting of a corpus of 12 hours of remote collaborative design sessions with the DSDC. We highlight the learning effects while using our system, conclude on its effectiveness and discuss our methodology.     

Advances in collaborative evaluation

Collaborative evaluation is an approach that offers, among others, many advantages in terms of access to information, quality of information gathered, opportunities for creative problem-solving, and receptivity to findings. In the last decade, collaborative evaluation has grown in popularity along with similar participatory, empowerment, and utilization-focused evaluation approaches. Increasingly, it has brought together evaluators and stakeholders from different sectors, disciplines, and cultures to exchange knowledge on how collaboration can be used as a strategic tool for fostering and strengthening evaluation practice. O'Sullivan (2004) and Rodríguez-Campos (2005, 2008) brought forward collaborative evaluation conceptual frameworks that distinguished it from other approaches. This article updates those conceptual frameworks and discusses key collaborative evaluation advances in order to further clarify and facilitate engagement in sound practice.     

Building institutional capacity in rural Northern Ireland: the role of partnership governance in the LEADER II programme

Throughout the 1990s, Europe's rural areas increasingly embraced local action and local development solutions to face the challenge of the continued re-structuring of the agricultural industry. In parallel, in both the EU and the UK, a policy discourse has emerged which envisages a fundamental shift in support policies for rural areas from a sectoral approach (essentially agriculture) to one that is territorial. At the vanguard of these developments has been the EC's LEADER Programme. From a low base of entrepreneurial activity in rural Northern Ireland, LEADER area-based local action groups have acted as beacons for developing new approaches to diversifying the rural economy—in particular stimulating a significant reappraisal of the rural resource base. This paper charts the operational terrain of LEADER local action groups in the Province, suggesting that their strengths have been in developing the institutional capacity of rural communities and brokering connections in the local economy. Examples will be considered which illustrate enhanced coordination and collaboration of local economic actors and sectoral interests, and a strong facilitator role for LEADER groups in the local arena, with an explicit rural focus. The paper argues that this multi-level collaborative activity is rooted in partnership governance, enabling a communicative process among local stakeholders.     

Advances in collaborative evaluation

Collaborative evaluation is an approach that offers, among others, many advantages in terms of access to information, quality of information gathered, opportunities for creative problem-solving, and receptivity to findings. In the last decade, collaborative evaluation has grown in popularity along with similar participatory, empowerment, and utilization-focused evaluation approaches. Increasingly, it has brought together evaluators and stakeholders from different sectors, disciplines, and cultures to exchange knowledge on how collaboration can be used as a strategic tool for fostering and strengthening evaluation practice. O'Sullivan (2004) and Rodríguez-Campos, 2005, Rodríguez-Campos, 2008 brought forward collaborative evaluation conceptual frameworks that distinguished it from other approaches. This article updates those conceptual frameworks and discusses key collaborative evaluation advances in order to further clarify and facilitate engagement in sound practice.     

Assumption-aware tools and agency; an interrogation of the primary artifacts of the program evaluation and design profession in working with complex evaluands and complex contexts

Like artisans in a professional guild, we evaluators create tools to suit our ever evolving practice. The tools we use as evaluators are the primary artifacts of our profession, reflect our practice and embody an amalgamation of paradigms and assumptions. With the increasing shifts in evaluation purposes from judging program worth to understanding how programs work, the evaluator’s role is changing to that of facilitating stakeholders in a learning process. This involves clarifying purposes and choices, as well as unearthing critical assumptions. In such a role, evaluators become major tool-users and begin to innovate with small refinements or produce completely new tools to fit a specific challenge or context.We interrogate the form and function of 12 tools used by evaluators when working with complex evaluands and complex contexts. The form is described in terms of traditional qualitative techniques and particular characteristics of the elements, use and presentation of each tool. Then the function of each tool is analyzed with respect to articulating assumptions and affecting the agency of evaluators and stakeholders in complex contexts.     

Doing it differently: emancipatory autism studies within a neurodiverse academic space

Abstract

In the current research climate, in which many autistic and autism communities are increasingly calling for a move towards collaborative forms of research, we consider how a loosely formed epistemological community may serve to challenge ‘business as usual’ in the academy. Mindful of the need to move beyond theory, we use this experience to concretely consider how knowledge about autism and neurotypicality can be meaningfully (co)-produced, and made available both to the research community and also to autistic and autism communities. Here, we use our own co-production of this article to explore how autistic experience may trouble normative meanings of academic knowledge production. We also consider the limits and possibilities of a neurodiverse research collaboration to reflect on ways in which a loose epistemological space may serve to contribute to knowledge about both autism and neurotypicality, adding to debate around collaborative research.     

Assessing the Congruence Between Conceptualization and Implementation of the Collaborative Objective in a Child Sexual Abuse Response Team

ABSTRACT

Community collaboration is an exciting way in which community members, multiple agencies, and professionals are organizing to approach the ever-increasing problem of child sexual abuse. This article discusses a formative evaluation of a Child Sexual Abuse Response Team (CSART), an inter-agency approach to responding, to victims of child sexual abuse in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia. The purpose of the formative evaluation was to determine the congruence between the conceptualized collaborative objective of the CSART, as stated in the grant application, and its actual implementation during the first year of program activity. Despite minor incongruence, implementation of the community-based collaborative objective was found to have been achieved m a nondisruptive manner and to have been highly congruent with its conceptualization. Confusion on the part of different agency personnel about roles and responsibilities, particularly during the investigation phase of a report of child sexual abuse, was found to be the major area of incongruence. Additionally, the process of performing a formative evaluation resulted in CSART participants placing more attention on incongruence between conceptualization and implementation of the collaborative objective. A greater congruence between conceptualization and implementation of the collaborative objective thus resulted from CSART members participating in the evaluation process.     

Connecting the dots: implementing and evaluating a network intervention to foster scientific collaboration and productivity

This article presents the design and implementation of a network intervention to foster scientific collaboration at a research university, and describes an experimental framework for rigorous evaluation of the intervention’s impact. Based on social network analysis of publication and grant data, an innovative type of research funding program was developed as a form of alteration of the university’s collaboration network. The intervention consisted in identifying research communities in the network and creating a new collaborative relation between pairs of unconnected researchers in selected communities. The new collaboration was created to maximally increase the overall cohesion of the target research community. In order to evaluate the impact of the program, we designed a randomized experiment with treatment and control communities based on the Rubin Causal Model approach. The paper describes the intervention design, reports findings from the program implementation, and discusses the statistical framework for future evaluation of the intervention.     

Collaboration for community-based wildlife management

Perhaps as remarkable as the general upsurge in public interest in wildlife over the last 30 years is the trend toward greater community-based wildlife management since the late 1980s. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities at the local, community scale of collaboration for wildlife management. We explain how collaborative activity between the professional wildlife manager and community stakeholders can lead to improved identification of human-wildlife interactions and better understanding of wildlife-related impacts that are of primary management concern in the community. Community-based collaborative decision making can also effectively result in the specification of management actions that are acceptable to a community. Furthermore, agency-community collaboration can lead to co-management that goes beyond stakeholder input or involvement in decision making about management objectives and actions, and includes appropriate sharing of responsibility for implementation and evaluation. A growing role for the wildlife agency in such situations is facilitating the development of local capacity by filling information and process needs so that individuals and groups in a community can participate effectively in collaborative efforts appropriate to the necessary level of agency-community engagement. This opportunity for the wildlife profession promises to be rewarding and have lasting positive influence on communities for the benefit of wildlife management. However, most agencies cannot address every issue at a community level. Public wildlife managers need guidelines for judgment about when to engage in community-based wildlife management. They need to assess various risks associated with not engaging in a particular issue and to prioritize the potential situations where various degrees of community engagement may be desirable. This paper highlights these intriguing challenges and opportunities associated with community-based wildlife management. An erratum to this article is available at .     

ARTICULATING DIVIDES IN DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE PRACTICE

Working together has always been a challenge but recent trends in who works with whom, on what, and across what regions, cultures, disciplines and time zones have conspired to increase the complexity of team work, and in particular the complexity of knowledge work and communication across knowledge divides. Drawing from literature and examples of practice obtained during research on distributed, collaborative teams, this paper examines constraints to collaborative practice. It is argued that crossing knowledge divides requires articulating often invisible, taken-for-granted knowledge-based asset specificities that constrain what is recognized and accepted as practice in the different fields or occupations involved in the collaboration. Different types of specificities are discussed as examples to stimulate recognition and articulation of distributions in practice. The paper then discusses ways of recognizing domain constraints on the way to articulating divides and achieving collaboration across distributions in knowledge, practice and technology.     

Coordination and Convention: The Organization of the Concert World

The organization of collaborative work is generally the focus of formal organization researchers. This article examines collaboration organized through an alternative framework, the “social world.” The substantive focus is the concert world, where the interdependent activities of composition and performance are routinely coordinated to produce concerts. Coordination of these activities takes place through musical conventions, which act as an alternative to administrative processes used in formal organization. But the use of conventions vary in the concert world depending on the organizational characteristics of concert collaboration, called “coordination problems”, and the aesthetic interests of participants. The first part of this article develops a model to assess coordination problems in social worlds, and the second part of the article uses the model to analyze collaboration in repertory, academic, and avant-garde concert activities.