Sg2009wc:interdisp
From She's Geeky Wiki
Title: Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Science: approaches and obstacles.
Session:3-C Bay Area Jan 2009
Convener: Saki Bailey-Reitz
Notetaker: Sharon Minsuk (all errors are entirely my own!)
Attendees:
- Stephanie Moore-Fuller
- Kathy Lass
- Mary Trigiani
- Carolyn Gale
- Saki Bailey
- Sharon Minsck
Questions/obstacles discussed:
-* What are the barriers between engineers, scientists, business people, collaborating with one another?
- How can teams work together?
- How to get participants to take the time to translate their expertise to be accessible to team members, and to be open to the expertise of others, without feeling they are wasting their time?
- How to find a common taxonomy so that participants have a language to communicate in? Is there way to create a mapping between differing taxonomies?
- Scientists often don’t appreciate what the software engineers bring to add value; they know a little programming themselves, so they see the engineer as just an assistant who does the tedious work. No appreciation of best logic design, scalability, or even correctness.
- How to put together a successful team?
- Personality types in different disciplines don’t always mesh.
- What seems to be missing in interdisciplinary collaborations: A “facilitator” or “community manager”. It was even a challenge for our session participants to find the right name for this that wouldn’t be off-putting to somebody.
Approaches:
- “Domain driven design” – domain expert and software expert jointly come up with design needs.
- Articulate common goals shared by the participants.
- Must have a reward system that rewards collaboration.
- (From design company, IDEO) Find people who are a “T”: each has a little broad knowledge of all areas of the collaborative task (the cross-bar of the “T”), not only the deep but narrow specialist knowledge (the vertical bar of the “T”). This way all the cross-bars overlap and the team members can talk with each other about their respective specialties.
- Need to create an understanding of the value of management/facilitation for improving communication between team members.
- Taxonomy-mapping: mind-map meets wiki?
- Participants should use stories to explain their concepts instead of relying on their taxonomies, which may not communicate.