Online discussion communities play an important role in the development of relationships and the transfer of knowledge within and across organizations. Their underlying technologies enhance these processes by providing infrastructures through which group-based communication can occur. Community administrators often make decisions about technologies with the goal of enhancing the user experience, but the impact of such decisions on how a community develops must also be considered. To shed light on this complex and underresearched phenomenon, we offer a model of key latent constructs influenced by technology choices and possible causal paths by which they have dynamic effects on communities. Two important community characteristics that can be impacted are community size (number of members) and community resilience (membership that is willing to remain involved with the community in spite of variability and change in the topics discussed). To model community development, we build on attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) theory, introducing two new concepts: participation costs (how much time and effort are required to engage with content provided in a community) and topic consistency cues (how strongly a community signals that topics that may appear in the future will be consistent with what it has hosted in the past). We use the proposed ASA theory of online communities (OCASA) to develop a simulation model of community size and resilience that affirms some conventional wisdom and also has novel and counterintuitive implications. Analysis of the model leads to testable new propositions about the causal paths by which technology choices affect the emergence of community size and community resilience, and associated implications for community sustainability.

In this paper we report the results of a qualitative research study of the GENI cyberinfrastructure: a program of four federated cyberinfrastructures. Drawing on theories of stakeholder positioning, we examine how different GENI stakeholders attempt to enlist new participants in the cyberinfrastructures of GENI, and leverage existing relationships to create sustainable infrastructure. This study contributes to our understanding of how cyberinfrastructures emerge over time through processes of stakeholder alignment, enrollment, and through synergies among stakeholder groups. We explore these issues to better understand how cyberinfrastructures can be designed to sustain over time.

Intercultural collaboration is often hampered by the manner in which teams communicate, or fail to communicate, their ideas, concerns, and feelings. Computer-mediated communication and the virtual nature of collaboration tend to exacerbate such communication issues into problems of conversation dominance, misattribution, and group conflict. New communication tools have the potential to mitigate some of these problems by augmenting individuals' and team's awareness of their communication inputs and processes. We explore how such feedback affects the communication content, attention distribution, and affective states of Chinese and American collaborators engaged in a creative design task. We describe our tool, present preliminary findings from an ongoing lab experiment, and discuss next steps in our research regarding ways of detecting the impact of real-time conversation feedback in intercultural collaboration environments.

This one-day workshop aims to stimulate research on the sharing and reuse of scientific resources in cooperative scientific work. As science trends toward increasing geographic and temporal scales, larger collaborations, and greater interdisciplinarity, scientific resources increasingly need to be more mobile and integrated with computer supported information and communication environments. Sharing, reuse and circulation of resources become a central challenge and critical component of cooperative scientific work. We interpret sharing broadly to include circulating scientific materials in any way that makes them available to other scientists. We include a variety of resources such as data, software, materials and specimens, workflows, technical know-how, clinical and laboratory protocols, and algorithms. We explore a range of sharing and reuse practices past and present, what motivates and limits them, how sharing can be done more effectively, what tools and techniques facilitate or constrain it, and how this relates to systems and science policy.

Computer-mediated collaboration is becoming an increasingly prevalent form of work ([22]). At the same time, organizations are relying more and more on culturally diverse teams to staff knowledge-intensive projects (e.g., software development, customer service, corporate training,). We conducted a laboratory study examining the role of collaborative technologies and culture on 2-person team members' attributions of causes for their collaborative performance. Pairs of American, Chinese, and intercultural American-Chinese students collaborated on two map navigation tasks using one of three technologies: video, audio, or IM. As predicted, culture and technology interacted to affect the extent to which members attributed performance to dispositional factors (e.g., personality or mood) vs. situational factors (e.g., the technology or task difficulty). We discuss the implications of our results for cross-cultural collaborative work.