Mobile social media in inter-organizational projects: Aligning tool, task and team for virtual collaboration effectiveness

Inter-organizational projects face unique challenges and opportunities due to team diversities and task complexity. Mobile social media like WhatsApp and WeChat emerge as new-generation collaboration tools in such endeavors. Based on a literature review, this study posits that how well team-tool, task-tool and team-task relationships are handled shape virtual collaboration effectiveness. The conceptual framework, validated with the interviews from inter-organizational project team members in China and the USA, leads to a research model. The results of a larger-scale survey confirm that tool usability, task fit and team connectivity contribute to virtual collaboration effectiveness, which affects project management success and team appreciation. In addition, there are noticeable cross-country differences, especially the opposite moderating effects that degree of use imposes on the relationship between virtual collaboration effectiveness and project management success. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed

Sustaining effectiveness in global teams: The co-evolution of knowledge management activities and technology affordances

Despite the dynamic nature of knowledge-related activities and the availability of a variety of communication technologies, many global teams habitually use technology in the same way across activities. However, as teams move through cycles of accumulating, integrating, and implementing knowledge, the purposes for communication technologies change. Current theorizing and empirical work on team knowledge management has yet to develop a dynamic theory that incorporates these changes. By conducting a multiwave, mixed method analysis of 48 global teams, we develop a theory of how global teams sustain effectiveness through technology affordance processes. We found that effective teams are those that recognize cues indicating change is necessary and coevolve a symbiosis between new activities, new purposes for interaction, and new uses of communication technologies. This coevolution of purpose with technology use forms new affordances, which enable the team to move on to new knowledge management activities and sustain effectiveness. Our theory more realistically models the dynamics of staying connected while sharing, combining, and implementing knowledge across the globe

Challenges in Complex Systems Science

FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT. The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having: many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities; interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics; combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context, science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT agenda

Dynamics of online chat

Millions of people use online synchronous chat networks on a daily basis for work, play and education. Despite their widespread use, little is known about their user dynamics. For example, one does not know how many users are typically co-present and actively engaged in public interaction in the individual chat rooms of any of the numerous public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks found on the Internet; or what are the factors that constrain the boundaries of user activity inside those chat rooms. Failure to collect and present such data means there is a lack of a good understanding of the range of user interaction dynamics that large-scale chat technologies support. This dissertation addresses this gap in the research literature through a year-long field study of the user-dynamics of Austnet, a medium-sized IRC network (103 million messages sent to 7,180 publicly active chat-channels by 489,562 unique nicknames over a one-year period). Key results include: 1) the first rich quantitative description of a medium-sized chat network; 2) empirical evidence for user information-processing constraints to patterns of chat-channel engagement (maximum 40 posters and 600 public messages per chat-channel per 20-minute interval); 3) a short-term channel engagement model which highlights the extent to which immediate channel activity can be reliably predicted, and identifies the best predictor variables; 4) a model for the identification of factors that can be used to distinguish highly predictable channels from unpredictable channels; and 5) the first empirical study of how the Critical Mass theory can help in predicting the channels\u27 long-term chances of survival by looking at their initial starting conditions. Collectively, the results highlight how the knowledge of chat network dynamics can be used in making accurate predictions about the chat-channels\u27 levels of short-term activity, and long-term survivability. This is important because it can lead to improved designs of future synchronous chat technologies. Such designs would benefit both the users of the systems, by providing them real-time recommendations about where to find successful group discourse, and the managers of the systems, by providing them vital information about the health of their communities

Negotiating romantic and sexual relationships: Patterns and meanings of mediated interaction

Everyday life is characterized by multimodality (Walther & Parks, 2002), but little research has examined how media use is incorporated into romantic/sexual relationships. The purpose of this dissertation was to better understand how communication technologies are being integrated into romantic and/or sexual relationships across stages of relational development and to uncover the underlying patterns of, expectations for, and meanings associated with that media use. In order to address this purpose, mixed-methods were employed. During phase one, 37 semi-structured interviews were conducted, which allowed for the qualitative exploration of the expectations and meanings participants attached to media use in romantic/sexual relationships. This was followed by phase two, in which a survey was constructed based upon the findings highlighted in the interview analysis and administered to 120 participants. This study adds to the growing body of literature about how young adults are incorporating communication technologies into their courtship practices (e.g., Gershon, 2010a, 2010b; Jin & Peña, 2010; Pascoe, 2009). First, these results confirm that college students are not following traditional scripts for engaging in romantic relationships (see also Bogle, 2008; Pascoe, 2009). Second, by examining how students talk about their romantic and sexual entanglements, this study uncovered and defined four terms they frequently used to describe their relationships: talking to, hanging out, dating, and hooking up. Third, the results of this study indicate that as relationships grow closer, individuals are more likely to communicate with their partners over the phone. Finally, this dissertation couples traditional interpersonal communication theories - uncertainty reduction and facework - with perspectives about media use: technological affordances and media symbolism. Results revealed that within romantic/sexual relationships characterized by high relational uncertainty (Knobloch & Solomon, 1999), partners negotiate potentially face-threatening situations by strategically employing technologies that allowed them to most effectively preserve their positive face