The TWU Collaboratory is a "virtual group" of scholars who came together online to create a submission to the National Science Foundation's new Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence research initiative. Collaboratory participants include five professors from different Colleges of the University, three doctoral students from three different programs, and a variety of other university professionals. The group engaged in online discourse using distributed email and web-based documents between February and June while drafting the group's $3 million, 5-year NSF grant proposal.

 The Collaboratory proposes to study the formation and life cycles of problem-oriented, interdisciplinary collaboratories, or "laboratories without walls." The Nix-Jackson article investigates theoretical grounding for the study of rhetorical aspects of online discourse during the formation stage of the collaboratory experience. The article was posted on the group's website for review by Collaboratory participants prior to submission to the new electronic peer-reviewed journal, The Journal of Online Behavior, and thus has already undergone a unique sort of "peer review." In fact, preparing the article for submission was collaborative work, Nix-Jackson explained. "Not only did members of the Collaboratory read the article as it was being written, but the idea to submit it to this particular journal came via the collaboratory, and collaboratory participants helped prepare the document for submission. It’s a real mind-bender, working so closely with others you never see in such a supportive, noncompetitive environment…very nurturing…and doing it all online: no meatspace meetings or paper exchange."

 The TWU Collaboratory proposal, "Creating Human Collaboratories and Third Level Literacy" was the University's first all-electronically submitted grant proposal, and included active participation by university administration as well as its professors and students. The proposal is currently under funding consideration and may be read at http://www.intertwining.org/collaboratory/proposal.html.

Dr. John D'Angelo, Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies and recently named Director for TWU's new Center for Innovation and Teaching Excellence, serves as the primary mentor for the virtual group, and is the Collaboratory's Principle Investigator. "This project is an example of the type of scholarly work we can all look forward to," he explained. "What we have was one person's idea taken up by a group of interdisciplinary scholars, each from different departments with different research interests, and each of whom uses different terminology, has different expertise, and different levels of technological literacy. From that came a large research proposal, and now the first individual member’s scholarly journal submission. It’s a blurry way of doing work, but it is undoubtedly the way of the future."

 joanne twining williams, LIS doctoral candidate and NEA Title IIB Fellow, who's idea sparked the Collaboratory project, thinks collaboratory work is so much the way of the future she’s researching collaboratories for her dissertation. "This is also a fine example of the need for reexamination of the scholarly reward systems of tenure by publication count," she explained. "Dr. D'Angelo mentored me, and I mentored Nix-Jackson, who wrote the article from a sort of group-mind space. Under the current system of rewards, Gayle would get the "publication count" and the database entry, and while in fact, she is the author, and the intellectual work is very much hers alone, it could not have come about without this 'distributed mentoring' and the active participation of the other Collaboratory participants." However, giving even secondary attribution to the Collaboratory is problematic since individual participants may come and go, while the Collaboratory itself remains constant.

 The five other professors, each a seasoned and senior researcher in their field, played key roles in the project solidification and willingly submitted themselves to various levels of online group "brain picking" during the drafting of the proposal. "We had some very exciting intellectual encounters," D’Angelo added, "it took quite a bit of ‘shedding of old skin’ on everyone’s part to come this far. It’s exciting new territory."

 The TWU Collaboratory’s online exchange, or electronic discourse, is archived, and, along with various versions of the proposal and its supporting documentation, is the foundation of the group's "virtual research library," which they hope to eventually turn into a national resource supporting a databank of willing NSF collaboratory scholars. "It’s a sort of ‘living library’ twining williams explained, ‘not at all stagnant, nor document-based, rather communication based with all sorts of strings and links possible.

 "One of the interesting aspects of our proposal is the creation of a new system of rewards: The NSF Scholar Month, which is how Collaboratory participants might be encouraged to join the initiative," she added. "Each collaboratory scholar signs up for a chunk of time, which they alone determine how, where and when to spend it, perhaps in the south of France thinking, perhaps as five minutes a day throughout the year, online." Freedom and choice are important elements of this system of rewards. In exchange for lending their brain to whatever problem the collaboratory adopts, they get remuneration based on the annualized mean faculty salary of the institution. For instance, ten percent of a scholar’s time represents a ‘NSF Scholar Month.’ These scholarly months can be distributed across institutions, or between institutions, and might be used for long-term or short-term participation. It’s a sort of fluid funding that supports a very fluid idea and offers some interesting possibilities. Scholars, regardless of affiliation, would receive partial funding as participants in a national initiative, and would be free to use that time however they choose. Their home institutions would get a little extra help making the personnel budget without having to administer the program. "We think of the scholar month as ‘time in mind,’" twining williams explained, "which was the #1 need expressed by scholars during a preliminary survey to determine what might motivate participation."

Nix-Jackson elaborated another aspect of the Collaboratory’s work, "One of the first issues that came up during discourse about the collaboratory by the collaboratory was about attribution of the scholarly work that would undoubtedly be produced." These "rules of the road" were among the prime information needs expressed by NSF in its Request for Proposals under the KDI initiative: who gets credit for what, and does an otherwise a very competitive and individualistic style of work adapt to the collaboratory concept?

Another interesting issue is who ‘owns’ the information produced by a collaboratory, and can scholars take their contribution with them when they leave? "It very well may be that ten scholars from around the country come together online to tackle a problem and in doing so create an information base that belongs neither to any of them individually, nor to any of their home institutions," D'Angelo explained. "Perhaps the value of the information created during one phase of the collaboratory isn’t recognized until another time and place, when it is turned into knowledge by a whole other group of participants. This is why librarianship needs to be involved from the beginning. Librarians understand how public knowledge can be managed, and are uniquely positioned to help inform the protocols."

twining williams has made "The Rules of the Road" for collaboratory participation the topic of her dissertation. "This is a very exciting field to be investigating," she remarked. "To participate in a collaboratory takes a very special sort of intellectual strength and confidence…a sort of highly individual group mindthink. It will be helpful to know what one might expect and what one might encounter before joining the Collaboratory initiative."

Funding for KDI proposals is expected to be announced in November. The KDI initiative is a five year, nationwide project, with an expected $70 million available each of those years. "We’re asking for $3 million over five years," D’Angelo explained, "a very small part of the overall KDI budget. Our proposal is unique in that it does not ask for money for technology. One of the precepts of our proposal is that we have enough technology and we’re not using it to its full capability, so spending more is not necessary." D’Angelo’s research focus is on the use of technology in education, and particularly on the levels of literacy within the professoriate. The interdisciplinary problem the TWU Collaboratory intends to tackle first is defining levels of technological literacy and devising a model to achieve "exponential literacy" in order to maximize existing resources.

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