EAGER: Collaborative Research: Some Assembly Required: Understanding the Emergence of Teams and Ecosystems of Teams

This research project will develop a theoretical and computational framework to understand and enable the socio-technical dynamics shaping the assembly of teams in distributed global contexts. The main barrier to understanding and explaining the role of human centered computing in team assembly is finding a suitable research environment where (1) geographically distributed individuals from potentially different cultures are assembling in teams of varying sizes to accomplish a variety of tasks over varying durations; (2) their actions, interactions and transactions are captured with precise time-stamps; and (3) their outcomes would be recorded with well-defined metrics. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games offer a research environment that meets all of these requirements. EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, offers a potentially suitable research opportunity to study the assembly of teams and ecosystems of teams. It is notable for allowing as many as tens of thousands of people to interact simultaneously on a single server cluster, from around the world, through a well-developed economic system and serious long-term coalitions, in a more flexible action framework than many other popular games possess.

This high-risk high-payoff project will explore the feasibility of using data from EVE Online to identify the socio-technical and cultural mechanisms that explain the assembly of teams more generally. If successful, the study will serve as a model for larger scale studies that, in addition to identifying the assembly mechanisms also assess the impact of these mechanisms on the performance of global teams. The most important and complex decisions in society are made in teams. And yet, assembling effective teams is a daunting task. While there is an awareness of how team collaborations can spearhead socio-economic change, we still have sparse sociotechnical knowledge of how globally distributed cross-cultural teams and systems of teams are assembled. This project seeks to address this limitation. First, the proposed research offers the promise to launch a new generation of theorizing and research on the assembly mechanisms of teams and ecosystem of teams. The empirical data that will be used to develop and test these theories will be a high risk effort but with potential for unprecedented scale, size, and completeness. Second, the research will arguably be the first effort in the field of social networks to develop hypergraph techniques to study assembly of teams and ecosystems of teams.

The knowledge and tools developed in this research will allow practitioners to cultivate more effectively the emergence and performance of ad hoc teams in business, science and gaming. It will also provide other scientific disciplines with new computational statistical modeling methodologies and tools to model hypergraphs.