Though there has been an explosive rise in remote work arrangements since the Covid-19 pandemic, there is surprisingly little research on remote teamwork and its impact on creativity, productivity, and worker satisfaction. Meetings are a central feature of such teamwork. As researchers Anita Blanchard and Joseph Allen wrote in a 2022 article, “Successful meetings lead to productive workgroups but we do not know why or how.” They argue that group identity, or “entitativity,” can be strengthened through formal meetings alongside informal interactions over lunch or in the hallway. “Meetings serve as the primary formal occasion in which workgroup entitativity can be maintained or repaired for optimal workgroup performance.” This grant supports an ambitious research project by Blanchard and Allen to empirically assess the degree to which (and which features of) virtual meetings produce stronger group entitativity and to test a hypothesis about whether other mechanisms for informal team awareness might improve the entitativity of virtual, distributed teams. For the latter, they will test whether adoption of Gather.town, a 2-D virtual workspace where one can engage in informal video chats with remote collaborators, increases entitativity, and then quantify its impact on measures of collaboration success. Their findings promise to advance our knowledge of team science and could inform the design of new systems for virtual team collaboration.

This grant supports the continued operation and growth of the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project.  Led by Sean Goggins and Matt Germonprez, CHAOSS is an organization devoted to the creation thriving open source software communities through the development and adoption of research-driven “community metrics” that assess the responsiveness, engagement, inclusion, and other properties of the distributed community of developers who build and maintain a given project. Well-designed community metrics are critical signals of the resilience and sustainability of an open source project, can inform risk assessment decisions about the use of a particular piece of open source software, and can facilitate efforts to improve the well-being of project contributors and users. Since its founding, CHAOSS has grown from initially defining a handful of metrics to supporting entire systems of practice and research across industry and academia. CHAOSS’ activities include research on open source project health and sustainability, growing and supporting a community which helps define what open source project health and sustainability mean, public dissemination of databases and resources for informed decision-making, and continued maintenance and development of CHAOSS data and tools. Grant funds will support the continuation and expansion of these activities, as well as several new ones, including the launch of a new data science initiative aimed at lowering barriers to adoption; support for regional community leads in under-resourced areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the execution of plans to move the organization toward independent financial sustainability.

This grant provides ongoing support to Ian Cosden at Princeton University, who is formalizing “US-RSE”, a professional association for research software engineers (RSEs) based in the United States. RSEs are a relatively new role within research organizations and typically combine software engineering expertise with experience in specific research disciplines, a role that has become increasingly important as research teams grow more dependent on software to do their work. Grant funds will allow Cosden and the Steering Committee to scale up US-RSE’s efforts by hiring key staff members, supporting an annual conference, awarding community-driven mini-grants, and upgrading critical organizational infrastructure.