Enabling Remote Participation in Research

Introduction

Ubiquitous information and communication technologies are having transformative effects on the ways in which people socialize and work together. In particular, “virtual organizations”—aggregations of individuals, facilities and resources that span geographic and institutional boundaries—are an increasingly common work structure in a range of settings (DeSanctis and Monge, 1998). Virtual organizations enable interaction between individuals with diverse and varied perspectives who might not otherwise work together (Birnholtz and Horn, 2007), the sharing of expensive and scarce resources (Finholt, 2003, Kouzes and Wulf, 1996), and allow for novel ways of accomplishing tasks and solving problems (Atkins et al., 2003, Nentwich, 2003).

Among the many potential benefits of these technologies, the facilitation of increased access to scarce research apparatus and resources was among the first to be explored (NRC, 1993, Finholt, 2003). Consequently, a range of collaboratory projects have sought to increase access to and aggregate data from remote shared instruments (Olson et al., 1998), and to provide remote manipulation capabilities for laboratory apparatus, such as microscopes (Kouzes and Wulf, 1996). While these examples are specific to the research domain, the lessons learned can also be applied in areas such as telemedicine or remote consultation on repair of complex devices.

A key issue when providing access to remote instruments is providing all participants in the activity, both local and remote, with enough information to have an adequate shared understanding of what is taking place—that is, what Clark and Brennan (1991) refer to as common ground. As Birnholtz et al. (2005) point out, however, the amount of information and interaction needed to achieve common ground depends significantly on the grounding constraints (Clark and Brennan, 1991) present in the specific situation at hand. Some situations require more detailed discussion and may require more information, while others have simpler requirements. How to predict in advance the grounding needs for a particular situation, however, remains an open question.

This is a particularly important question for the realm of providing shared access to research apparatus and instruments. There are a number of modes of collaboration, ranging from traditionally structured projects involving a small number of investigators working closely together, all the way to distributed “mass collaborations” like NASA Clickworkers (Kanefsky et al., 2001) or the ESP game (von Ahn and Dabbish, 2004) where distributed collaborators contribute effort, but make no intellectual contribution to the project. There’s also a vast space in between these two extremes; Wikipedia, for example, probably sits more toward the latter category, but it does allow for some more cerebral contributions. Given the various grounding needs and constraints due to the wide range of participatory modes for distributed collaborators, an important design question is therefore how we should think about providing information to remote participants.