Collaborations and border crossings….
A recent study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research detailed the requirements and services available for optimizing how scientific collaborations are established on Facebook. Facebook????? Yes, Facebook. You read it right! The researchers found that beyond expertise…..
1. Compatibility in personality, work style, and productivity were essential;
2. Communication was also central in finding the right collaborators for the project and effectively searching in domains other than your own in a comprehensive manner;
3. The use of social networks was important in terms of intermediation — finding the right people to work with in the right way;
4. Managing information quality and access was also paramount in assuring successful collaboration and finally,
5. Sustaining motivation to collaborate was crucial in terms of keeping online profiles up to date and integrating that work in to the normal workflow of participants.
The authors of the study found that Facebook allowed for many of these conditions to be met. It allowed a “digital vita”, facilitated easy searches for partners and enabled the flow of documents among members. In my mind, this study demonstrates how the power of technology and collaborative communities really rests with those who participate with/in it.
Of course, not all our employers might buy us using Facebook for scientific or any form of clinical collaboration and this is a thorny issue. In the ideal world, researchers as free agents would join with their peers and work on research projects as they wished. The funds would flow freely, all research ideas would be valid, everyone would reap the rewards of such work and so on. Unfortunately, we do not live in such an utopia. Our institutions rely on our ideas to bring in funds and sometimes those funds constrain which ideas become reality. And so we become border crossers and bridge builders as we seek our collaborative partners in our quest to improve knowledge, practice and health.
Recently I had the opportunity to experience several of these dimensions all in one foul swoop. Two
collaborators and I decided to apply for a collaborative research fellowship recently. It all seemed simple at the start. Even though we were stretched across three institutions (border crossing), we had a collaborative project under way that we would augment and expand under the fellowship. We were in agreement with how it would work, what we would do, the timelines and had begun to work on our budgets. Then we met with our respective institutions. The fellowship would not pay indirect costs to our institutions, it wanted a full year teaching release for each of us to focus on our work and it would not pay fringe (non salary benefit) costs either. Such were the requests of the fellowship donor. Two of our institutions balked. One agreed. Of the two that balked, reasons included issues of cost –they wanted their costs to be covered; and issues of time — we could not be released from the classroom to work on the research together. The collective gymnastics we would have had to do to mediate between the fellowship demands and our institutional demands forced us to admit that as much as we could collaborate individually, our institutions could not. This was quite the revelation and spoke to the difficulties of the collaborative mission in a competitive, individualized environment. We were not even discussing Facebook!
If you are having difficulty building bridges or crossing those institutional borders, Kenneth Cohn, MD, writes about these journeys in his blog, Healthcare Collaboration. Cohn takes a multidimensional perspective to collaborative work including physician-physician collaborations and physician-administration collaboration. The topics of his blogs range across various dimensions of collaborating – rage, language, control, indifference, revolution, reflection and mentality, for example. He is insightful and pragmatic and soon, he will be a guest of ours on this blog! Hooray! So stay tuned and as the weather gets cooler, be well!
With thanks to Laughing Squid and Hornplayer for the pics!
Good things happen when we connect!
Kirsten Broadfoot
Tags: collaboration, collaborative communities, collaborative learning communities, Compatibility in personality, Facebook, healthcare collaboration, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Kenneth Cohn, motivation, productivity software, style of work, technology
