The report from the two workshops that Jonathan Cummings, Tom Finhiolt, Carl Kesselman, Katherine Lawrence, and I ran (with much help from Diana Rhoten) on "Building Effective Virtual Organizations" is now available on the BEVO website. The title is "Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations"--and that is what the report provides.
We lead off with the delightful quote from Arthur Mee, writing in the Strand Magazine in 1898:
If as it is said to be not unlikely in the near future, the principle of sight is applied to the telephone as well as that of sound, earth will be in truth a paradise, and distance will lose its enchantment by being abolished altogether.
Of course things are not quite so simple (fortunately!)--but it is certainly true that the Internet has transformed the practice of science. This report explains why that it is so, reviews exemplar projects that illustrate the nature of this transformation, and explains what we need to do next to take virtual organizations to the next level.
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