Professor Les Gasser, from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, has been awarded a $100,000 grant to organize an invitational workshop, focusing on areas covered by the National Science Foundation's Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) program—part of NSF's Office of CyberInfrastructure.

Much twenty-first century science and engineering work is done by distributed teams that share infrastructure, instruments, data, results, and work processes. Demands are increasing for both basic theory and critical technologies that support effective and efficient multi-disciplinary, collaborative teams and virtual organizations. The workshop, to be held in Winter 2012 in Southern California, is titled "Emerging Results, Critical Research Directions, and Grand Challenges for VOSS." The workshop will develop a picture of the state of the art in understanding of the sociotechnical processes that underpin virtual organizations. It will consolidate emerging knowledge and identify promising new research directions, including those that might be hold future promise but not yet be topical or generally recognized.

GSLIS PhD student Adam Kehoe is collaborating on the workshop organization and reports.

Gasser has spent his career investigating theories, technologies, social arrangements, and collective processes that underpin distributed information systems of many kinds, including organizational information systems, culture/language, and biological organisms.

For more information on GSLIS, visit http://www.lis.illinois.edu/

Maeve Reilly

Research Services Coordinator

Graduate School of Library and Information Science

University of Illinois

Rm 219 LIS

501 E. Daniel

Champaign, IL 61820

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(217) 244-7316