Decentralized Virtual Activities and Technologies: A Socio- Technical Approach

1 1. Introduction and motivation We see growing, widespread interest in the development and use of decentralized systems and virtual world environments as possible new places for engaging in collaborative work activities. The Gartner Group [1] declares that within five years 80% of Internet users and Fortune 500 companies will have an online presence in a virtual world of some kind. Furthermore, they estimate the collaborative and community-related aspects of these environments will dominate in the future. Elsewhere, there is widespread interest in stimulating new technological innovations that enable people to come together through social networking, file/media sharing, and massively multi-player online game play. This new generation of networked computing environments seems headed towards increased socialization, interaction, communication, and collaboration that span multiple organizational boundaries as its primary purpose. But how do we get there from here? Is it sufficient to just let the market of entrepreneurial vendors and technological innovators simply decide who needs what? The history of computing in organizational and work settings reveals that the adoption and integration of new technologies is rarely simply a matter of buying the lowest cost technical alternative. More often such history reveals a legacy of many failed or problematic efforts to develop and deploy computing systems that arise from a lack of understanding or recognition of the ways how people's work and social activities are situated in organizational and technological contexts. These contexts configure, constrain, or enable some types of activities to flourish while others are displaced, either unintentionally or intentionally. Our goal in this proposed study is to empirical investigate and comparatively analyze the development and use of decentralized virtual activities systems (DVAS) within a sample of five diverse organizational settings using a research approach that foregrounds a balanced socio-technical perspective.