IFIP Working Group 8.2 Working Conference on Virtuality and Virtualization
Location: Portland Marriott City Center, Downtown Portland, OR, USA
Date: 29-31 July 2007
Submissions due: 1 November 2006

The focus of the conference is on virtual work and virtualization (in their varieties of meanings) and their recursive influence on work practices, organizations and society. Possible topics include:
• defining virtuality
• personal experiences of virtual work
• theories to explain effects of virtuality
• teamwork in distributed teams
• the nature of distributed work practices
• virtuality and communication, coordination and collaboration
processes
• technologies contributing to virtualization
• mediation and disintermediation of work practices and organizations
• virtuality and team/organizational learning
• virtuality and changing organizational form and function
• impacts of virtuality on supply chains
• drivers, opportunities, and challenges of distributed production
• labour pools in countries contributing to distributed teams
• reinvention of place and time associated with virtualization

bolt media, a ‘networking site for people developing creative projects’, announced the winner of the first online collaborative song writing contest (at least they claim it’s the first time).

Bolt’s music experts and members of the band “Three Days Grace” chose five musicians, including a Christian rocker and youth pastor and a classical musician trained at the Berklee School of Music, to form Orangeblood.

The band created the song, called “Gunshy,” over the Internet using feedback, constructive criticism and remixed tracks from a new community of musicians.

that’s very cool! i wonder what sort of collaborative tools they offered the 5 musicians and what format the feedback/criticism was fed into the process. it doesn’t seem to be promoted heavily on the bolt website. i did find this blog post but there’s not many details. anyone try this website before?

btw, i knew bolt sounded familiar. their ‘about us’ page says they’ve been around 10 years in the youth sector & sure enough … they used to be a community website. looks like they’ve survived & morphed into social networking.

mediate.com has an article up about using myers-briggs in assessing conflict. the article is based on the work of damien killen and danica murphy who have written a booklet entitled ‘introduction to type and conflict’.

like everything with myers-briggs, the idea is to use the information as a tool to help understand others. i can’t find any information about the research they did except for this article and links to buy the booklet.

their work indicates the greatest area for conflict is between the thinking-feeling and judging-perceiving types. (aka the ‘conflict pairs’). the thinking type will want to fix the problem, is concerned with facts & maintains a firm position while the feeling type is concerned about the impact of the problem on other’s feelings & thoughts, ensuring there is give & take, accepting differences and needs & values. perceivers do not like to make quick decisions and want flexibility while judging people want to come to conclusion, focus on present & future and experience satisfaction when the conflict is over.

interesting wiki on DAR. DAR is – distributed action research.

the wiki is intended to be an area of collaboration for researchers working in the field of online communities. there’s also a google group. the site & group seem pretty new but definitely a place to watch!

it will be interesting to see if the focus is more on the collaboration of researchers working in online communities or the topic of action research and how it can be used with distributed groups. from reading the info on the wiki, i’m not sure if there is a concentration so that will be heavily influenced by the community. personally, i’d love to see some work around the ideas of using action research with distributed groups. this was something i was interested in when working on my thesis but didn’t have the chance (ie TIME) to fully develop & look into.

the cranky middle manager podcast has an interview this week with john blackwell about virtual work.

the interview is targetted at people who manage virtual teams and goes heavy on the people side – have informal conversations, don’t make people wake up at 3am for meetings. blackwell says they’re seeing 50-60% of workplaces having some degree of virtualness and even gives a quick case study of some benefits of virtual working.

blackwell highlights that traditionally we have had mentors and might have ‘managed by walking around’ whereas today we don’t have those role models when it comes to virtual teams. what a fantastic research area!!!! there was a study concerning people in virtual teams not growing as much as people in f2f due to this sort of mentoring/training that occurs at the watercooler & while walking around. or perhaps it was the perception they weren’t growing at the same rates. i’d have to dig to find it.

i love one phrase blackwell uses – communication continuium. that means ‘the whole array of tools we have to communicate’ and stresses we need not forget about that human touch. have informal calls not just meetings. use video. broaden human interaction.

have a listen. it’s a good podcast.