Biological and biomedical research is increasingly conducted in large, multi-institutional collaborations in order to tackle problems with significant societal impact, such as preventing infectious diseases or reducing antimicrobial resistance. However, these efforts are not adequately supported by existing technology. Thus, we aimed to elucidate the factors that cause communication technology and collaborative tools to hinder research. We found that (1) poor usability has a detrimental effect on the quality of scientific research, and (2) current technology is insufficient for communicating scientific knowledge. Given these results, we present opportunities for the HCI community to impact large-scale collaborative research projects affecting social change.
Citation
S. Morrison-Smith, C. Boucher, I. Wang, and J. Ruiz. 2016. Opportunities for Supporting Large-Scale Collaborative Projects. In Proceedings of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ’16): Workshop on Large-scale Collaborative Projects to Affect Societal Change.