Technological platforms make virtual collaboration possible. It is imperative that virtual teams take the technological platform seriously, because platforms do not just enable virtual collaboration, but they can also get in the way of virtual collaboration (Gilson et al 2015). By platforms we mean a wide variety of technologies, including email, video conferencing tools, shared document storage, shared document editors, content management systems, project hosting such as HubZero, and commercial software suites marketed as “groupware” systems like Microsoft Sharepoint or the Jive Collaboration software.
Despite marketing hype, platforms by themselves don’t do anything: what matters is the ways in which they are used (Desanctis and Poole, 1994). For example, there are many open source virtual collaborations that are registered on Github. Github, as a platform for open software development, offers useful tools, but projects vary widely in if and how they use different tools. Successful projects establish and maintain norms around platforms. Norms are simply the established or standard ways of working on a platform. For example, a collaboration may develop a naming convention for versions of documents (such as including a date and last author’s initials), or develop a norm about using comments in an online editor such as Google Docs.
Collaboration platforms are effective when they are a central meeting place for participants and when participants learn shared norms and conventions for their use (Maruping & Magni 2015). New platforms are constantly being created, and they make it easy to get started. Often it only takes a single member of the collaboration to sign up and send out a link to others. This can quickly lead to a fracturing of a collaboration’s records and documents, with multiple semi-abandoned platforms associated with a single on-going collaboration. Chopping and changing platforms leads to fractured attention. Even worse, it undermines the time and shared experience needed to evolve and learn shared ways of using platforms. There is value in establishing and maintaining a specific platform long enough for norms for its use to emerge and to become shared. As frustrating as older platforms can seem in comparison to shiny new platforms, having a single, well practiced, platform is likely of more value in the long run than any enticing features of a new platform. Some of the most successful open source teams, for example, only use email lists, even for practices such as voting (Crowston et al, 2012). New features are seen to solve immediate problems, but adopting a platform is a key decision with important consequences for the whole collaboration and should be undertaken rarely and with the involvement of all participants.
Holding a collaboration focused on learning and using a particular platform is an important leadership role. As with most pieces of technology there is a well understood tendency for the most powerful members of an organization to use their status to resist using unfamiliar technologies (Grudin, 1988; LaPointe and Rivard, 2005). It is difficult for less powerful members of a collaboration to influence the more powerful to work in particular ways. Conversely, visible and enthusiastic use of a platform by the leaders of a virtual collaboration sends a powerful message and shapes use of the platform throughout the team. Scholars refer to these effects as a form of “social proof” (Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004) and the ability of leaders to drive uptake as “information cascades” (Bikhchandani et al, 1992).
Finally, virtual collaborations have fluid and partial memberships. This means that all participants are unlikely to be working on an virtual collaboration full-time and that their involvement will be bursty, with a lot of activity during certain times, but inactivity for long periods (Ahuja et al 2003; Steinhardt and Jackson, 2014). Moreover, the power of a virtual collaboration comes from being able to access diverse skills and experience, which means being able to bring new members on board quickly and easily, often from new organizations, and to identify skills and experience of these new and existing team members. A directory of such capabilities - sometimes referred to as a “transactive memory system” - helps virtual organizations perform better (Choi et al 2010). It is imperative that virtual teams keep a current directory of “who knows what” and “who is responsible for what” over the course of a project, particularly for larger, more complex virtual teams, and those that are entirely virtual (Kanawattanachai & Yoo 2007).
Fluid and partial memberships also influence the impact of pricing schemes for virtual collaboration platforms. Some commercial platforms are expensive, requiring fees that give access to a particular number of users (often called per-seat pricing). These do not match fluid and bursty participation well because the collaboration has to pay for seats even during the times of low participation. Similarly, per-seat licensing often has steep pricing threshold built in, such as free for up to 10 users and $1,000 per user once you go over 10 users. Pricing schemes like that can make growing virtual collaborations, or replacing members, very painful. Similarly, platforms (e.g., Microsoft Sharepoint) are sometimes available free to members of particular universities through site-licensing. Yet building a virtual collaboration means extending across organizations but if a platform is limited to one set of users adding users from other organizations means adding on new platforms, undermining the centrality of any platform and disrupting the norming process that leads to effective platform use.
Further, because virtual team membership tends to be fluid and partial, it is critical that the team develop norms and expectations associated with the use of platforms and other collaborative activity. Since this partial and fluid membership and attention is so prevalent in virtual teams, the role of central people in the project is even more important (Ahuja et al 2003). Central people, such as leaders and administrative support who schedule and lead the activities must be fully engaged and consistent with coordinating all activity and setting a good example, reinforcing the norms of collaboration. A key critical finding of virtual teams literature highlights the importance of leadership to both setting the stage for effective collaboration with strong norms and conventions, and also constantly monitoring and reinforcing those norms (Bell and Kozlowski, 2002).
There are platforms for synchronous work and asynchronous work. For synchronous work such as meetings, conference calls, and web conferences, it is imperative that the medium both scale to the appropriate number of users and provide reliability at that scale. Many free web conferencing platforms that are fine for small groups do not scale well to bigger groups and can have issues with reliability. It is important that the team standardize the platforms and use the same platform across the collaboration as a part of admission.
Thus there are a number of important platform-related activities that must take place during the startup meeting. First, it is important to choose platform and begin using it at the face to face meeting. It is particularly tempting, since we are used to meeting face to face, to treat the startup meeting for a virtual collaboration like any other meeting. Yet it is important to remember that the working circumstances of the startup meeting will not continue: rather than being nearby, after the meeting participants will be at distance. Rather than all being present for long periods of time, participants will be returning to their busy work lives. Participants at ApacheCon, a meeting of a very successful open source community, had a norm for scheduling meetings when all members of a collaboration were available. Yet when they met they continued to (and practiced) using the platforms they used when at distance (Crowston et al., 2007). The startup meeting, therefore, should focus on learning to use the platform that will enable ongoing work after the meeting. Simply, projects should seek to start as they will continue. Being together but using platforms designed for remote work will seem strange at first, but will build norms to make working at distance more effective.