Keynote: The Coming Age of Virtual Organizations: Applying Lessons from the Early History of Geographically-Dispersed Collaboration

Summary form only given. Research agencies in the United States and around the world are now arguing for a new round of investment in computing and networks, termed "cyber infrastructure," to enable even more ambitious collaboration at the scale of thousands to tens of thousands of participants. Technology to support collaboration on this order is emerging, such as computational grids, and is being deployed within worldwide scientific enterprises, including the next generation of high energy physics experiments at CERN. However, despite this progress, it remains unclear whether lessons about effective virtual collaboration, gained from the first generation of collaborative tools, are being applied to guide the evolution of what have been termed "virtual organizations." This highlights socio-technical factors that undermine the effectiveness of virtual work and focuses on the special challenges of successfully addressing these factors in the coming age of virtual organizations.