Supporting mega-collaboration: a framework for the dynamic development of team culture

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This research project, inspired by the nationwide crisis following Hurricane Katrina, identifies mega-collaboration as an emergent social phenomenon enabled by the Internet. The substantial, original contribution of this research is a mega-collaboration tool (MCT) to enable grassroots individuals and organizations to rapidly form teams, negotiate problem definitions, allocate resources, organize interventions, and mediate their efforts with those of official response organizations. The project demonstrated that a tool that facilitates the exploration of a team’s problem space can support online collaboration. It also determined the basic building blocks required to construct a mega-collaboration tool. In addition, the project demonstrated that it is possible to dynamically build the team data structure through use of the proposed interface, a finding that validates the database design at the core of the MCT. This project has made a unique contribution by proposing a new operational vision of how disaster response, and potentially many other problems, should be managed in the future

Allocating Roles in Extreme Teams

New domains are emerging that impose new requirements for teamwork, where current teamwork infrastructure is inadequate. One such large class of application require extreme teams, which are large teams that need (soft) real-time response given dynamic tasks, and where many resource limited agents have similar functionality, but possibly varied capability. For in- stance, when responding to a disaster, fire fighters and paramedics comprise an extreme team as they must respond rapidly to dynamic tasks; and fire fighters can all extinguish fires although their capability to extinguish a particular fire quickly will depend on their initial distance from that fire.</p