Collaboratory
The word “collaboratory” is also used to describe an open space, creative process where a group of people work together to generate solutions to complex problems.
It is, as defined by Dr. Katrin Muff,[3] “an open space for all stakeholders where action learning and action research join forces, and students, educators, and researchers work with members of all facets of society to address current dilemmas.” The concept of the collaboratory as a creative group process and its application are further developed in the book “The Collaboratory: A co-creative stakeholder engagement process for solving complex problems”.
Particularly higher costs occurred when software packages were not available for purchase and direct integration into the collaboratory or when requirements and expectations were not met.
Today, however, such tools are available in off-the-shelf software packages such as Microsoft NetMeeting, IBM Lotus Sametime, Mbone Videoconferencing (Chin and Lansing, 2004).
Therefore, the design of collaboratories may now move beyond developing general communication mechanisms to evaluating and supporting the very nature of collaboration in the scientific context (Chin & Lansing, 2004).
As stated in Chapter 4 of the 50+20 [6]"Management Education for the World" book,[7] "the term collaboratory was first introduced in the late 1980s to address problems of geographic separation in large research projects related to travel time and cost, difficulties in keeping contact with other scientists, control of experimental apparatus, distribution of information, and the large number of participants.
In their first decade of use, collaboratories were seen as complex and expensive information and communication technology (ICT) solutions supporting 15 to 200 users per project, with budgets ranging from 0.5 to 10 million USD.
The introduction of a user-centered approach provided a first evolutionary step in the design philosophy of the collaboratory, allowing rapid prototyping and development circles.
Over the past decade the concept of the collaboratory expanded beyond that of an elaborate ICT solution, evolving into a “new networked organizational form that also includes social processes, collaboration techniques, formal and informal communication, and agreement on norms, principles, values, and rules”.
The term open-source was adopted by a group of people in the free software movement in Palo Alto in 1998 in reaction to the source code release of the Netscape Navigator browser.
Beyond providing a pragmatic methodology for free distribution and access to an end product's design and implementation details, open-source represents a paradigm shift in the philosophy of collaboration.
Chin and Lansing (2004) explore the shift of collaboratory development from traditional tool-centric approaches to more data-centric ones, to effectively support data sharing.
“A successful system must respect existing social conventions while encouraging the development of analogous mechanisms within the new electronic forum” (Henline, 1998, p. 69).
The author (Cogburn, 2003) is investigating a collaboratory established for researchers in education and other related domains from United States of America and southern Africa.
He further develops the idea that a successful CSCL would need to draw the best lessons learned on both sides in computer-mediated communication (CMC) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW).
The Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, Waterfall Glen collaboratory (Henline, 1998) is an illustrative example.
The vast majority of the evaluations performed thus far are concentrating mainly on the usage statistics (e.g. total number of members, hours of use, amount of data communicated) or on the immediate role in the production of traditional scientific outcomes (e.g. publications and patents).
Often the critical component to collaboration readiness is based on the concept of “working together in order to achieve a science goal” (Olson, Teasley, Bietz, & Cogburn, 2002, p. 46).
An important piece of the infrastructure is the technical support necessary to ensure version control, to get participants registered, and to recover in case of disaster.
Pricing structures for network connectivity can affect the choices that users will make and therefore have an effect on the collaboratory's final design and implementation.
From this tree-view the scientist may select a particular node (or an entire branch) to access a specific version of the data set (Chin & Lansing, 2004).
Resources availability was a major concern because many of the chemistry simulations could run for hours or even days on high-end workstations and produce Kilobytes to Megabytes of data sets.
The deployment of the infrastructure (videoconferencing tools, multicast routing capabilities, and data archives) was done in parallel (Pancerella, Rahn, & Yang, 1999).
One of the team's major challenges was to overcome the technological and social barriers in order to meet all of the objectives (Pancerella, Rahn, & Yang, 1999).
Henline (1998) mentions that the collaboratory has been successfully used to implement applications for distance learning, command and control center, telemedical bridge, and a remote consulting tool suite.
The collaboratory is emerging as a viable solution, using communication and computing technologies to relax the constraints of distance and time, creating an instance of a virtual organization.
