Derrick L. Cogburn, associate professor in Syracuse University's School of Information
Studies (iSchool), has been awarded a two-year, $199,927 grant by the National Science
Foundation (NSF) to support an interdisciplinary project titled "VOSS: Developing a
Comparative Meta-Analytical Model for Evaluating and Facilitating Accessible CI-Enabled
Virtual Organizations."
The NSF had announced a competition inviting proposals to study the applicability of
virtual organizations and the integration of technical and social aspects in such
organizations. Virtual organizations allow geographically dispersed members to collaborate
on the same project. Though technology is the cornerstone on which a virtual organization is
built, its social aspects, such as management and collaboration, are equally important. The
project proposed by Cogburn was one of 16 projects funded this round.
Cogburn, director of the Center for Research on Collaboratories and Technology Enhanced
Learning Communities (COTELCO), will head the project with professors from across SU,
including Peter Blanck, College of Law; Barry Davidson, L.C. Smith College of Engineering
and Computer Science; Margaret Hermann, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public
Affairs; and Tiffany Koszalka, School of Education. This project will encompass four phases
and will examine 10 sample virtual organizations in order to build a meta-analytical model.
The first phase is level setting. In this phase, the team will relate information from their
respective fields to the dynamics of virtual organizations. In the second phase, five existing
virtual organizations will be studied. A model will be built using this study to portray typical
characteristics of a virtual organization. The third phase involves, testing and refinement of
this model using five new virtual organizations. Finally, the model will be tested across the
entire sample to find out variability. The last phase is the dissemination of results to a broad
interdisciplinary research community.
The sample virtual organizations used in the research range from scholarly collaboratories to
corporate virtual teams. The empirical data used will have representative information from
social and behavioral sciences, policy advocates, transnational non-governmental
organizations and civil society networks. The project will also consider accessibility features
of cyberinfrastructure and universal design to study the participation issues faced by people
with disabilities in virtual organizations.
