Assignment #2

A few semesters ago, I worked on a research project for the Institute of Social Science studying Wikipedia and the roles of editors. The team was composed of one other undergraduate, two Ph.D students, postdoc researcher and 2-3 professors. What was interesting about the team was that people on the team came from very different areas of expertise; one professor and one graduate student were very technical Computer Science people, one was affiliated with the Communications department. The post doc researcher and another professor were studying Sociology. One researcher was on the west coast working for Microsoft Research studying collaborative technologies. As undergrads we were Government and Information Science majors with virtually no skills. Communication tools were composed of Ftf meetings, a wiki, Google Docs, and lots of emails. Our task was to design and complete a research project that concluded in a written paper.

The interaction process was interesting because proximity was an issue that we were forced to work around with one team member working from remote location. As sophomores, we were quick to conform to the opinions and decisions in larger meetings. However due to our schedule and distance there were people on the team whom I never met in person which made them seem impersonal and made their decisions seem more arbitrary. Smaller group meetings between the undergrads and our mentor gave us a much stronger sense of belonging in which we were more apt to speak our opinions. This definitely helped group maintenance in outcome of the project. Email discussions regarding the strategy of the project turned out to be very cumbersome and would have been better done in Ftf communication if it were possible. I feel like the academic diversity of the group was somewhat detrimental efficiency in that there were many tangents of hypothetical research that we could do and not enough focus on research we were going to do. Action items such as computer programming needed to be passed on to a smaller subgroup and completed before coming back to the main group. Use of the wiki was originally very unorganized but turned out to be moderately successful but only after certain rules and social norms were established. This included making definitive sections for tasks, news, results etc. with regular updates.

The output of the group was a paper that was written in Google Docs, which ended up taking a significantly long time to complete. Though the production goal was completed, the performance goal was not. Due to the fact that any member can always edit a Google Doc, it does not need to be passed from one person to the next and has no explicit dependencies on other people’s schedules (production blocking). However there were implicit dependencies, such as unifying literary style and document organization that took much longer to work out because there was less coordination in editing the document. At the conclusion of the semester we ended without a Ftf meeting and it never quite felt like our role was given a definitive conclusion. However I definitely felt like I had learned enough to make the experience worthwhile.