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Identifying Socio-Technical Means to Support Small Loosely Coupled Groups of Volunteers

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Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing (CRIWG+CollabTech 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11677))

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Abstract

Volunteers provide a large variety of valuable services to society spanning from local community efforts to global non-profit organizations and online communities. While larger volunteer groups and online communities in particular have been studied extensively, there is a lack of research on small loosely coupled volunteer groups especially with respect to the way they collaborate to organize activities. Our work attempts to shed light onto such groups. In this paper, we present results from an exploratory study of five student organizations. Based on a literature analysis we developed an interview protocol and corresponding coding scheme that allowed us to analyse how such groups cooperate and how they use technology to communicate and organize activities. Our findings indicate areas of improvement around higher levels of transparency, well defined procedures, effective knowledge management and exchange between similar groups. We discuss these potentials and propose an initial socio-technical conceptualization to overcome current issues and support collaboration in such groups.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Volunteer + {collaboration, team, work, organization, participation, sustainability, retention, turnover}, loosely coupled collaboration, ad-hoc teams, flash teams.

  2. 2.

    The full interview protocol can be retrieved from the authors upon request.

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Acknowledgements

Dr. Nolte’s contributions to this research were partially funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant no. NO 1302/1-1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Alexander Nolte

  2. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Alexander Nolte

  3. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Rosta Farzan

Authors
  1. Alexander Nolte
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  2. Rosta Farzan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander Nolte .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

    Hideyuki Nakanishi

  2. University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan

    Hironori Egi

  3. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Irene-Angelica Chounta

  4. Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan

    Hideyuki Takada

  5. Otsuma Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan

    Satoshi Ichimura

  6. University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Ulrich Hoppe

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Nolte, A., Farzan, R. (2019). Identifying Socio-Technical Means to Support Small Loosely Coupled Groups of Volunteers. In: Nakanishi, H., Egi, H., Chounta, IA., Takada, H., Ichimura, S., Hoppe, U. (eds) Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing. CRIWG+CollabTech 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11677. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28011-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28011-6_2

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28011-6

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