Collaboration Informatics

This chapter introduces the concept of a Virtual Organization (VO), using the Internet to link geographically separated participants in an efficient and novel manner. In particular, the chapter contrasts the attributes of Project VOs and Community VOs. The former tend to be more formal and arise for a particular collaborative goal with a limited lifetime. The latter are less formal and more open-ended, with a less specific purpose, largely aimed at developing an online community as an end in itself. The features of Project and Community VOs are compared and the various technologies are discussed. Two case studies are presented as examples. This is a rapidly changing area with new technologies becoming rapidly available, but the underlying concepts and reasons for the existence of VOs in the support of virtual collaborative practice remain more stable.

This study of collaboration among a multidisciplinary team of healthcare workers demonstrates that elements intrinsic to the interaction constitute a delicate ecosystem. As the balance between actors, digital media and paper artefacts fluctuates, so too the nature of the interaction and collaboration changes. Intrinsic to the multidisciplinary team (MDT) ecosystem is specialist knowledge, radiological images, pathology samples, together with the interpretation of the patient's findings, as well as the roles and responsibilities of the active participants and observer collaborators.