On Monday, May 12, NU hosted the National Forum on Interdisciplinary Team Development to lead both a face-to-face and virtual dialog between directors of NIH Roadmap grants who are all attempting to answer the same core question: How do we structure and manage interdisciplinary and inter-institutional science research consortia?
AT helped manage the event – developing a website for the forum participants, broadcasting the event via Adobe Connect to partners at the NIH, and covering the entire event on HD Video for future use.
Clearly, though, such a discussion could not be fully covered in a single day. So we are working to continue that discussion in a way befitting interdisciplinary and inter-institutional consortia. We are extending the life and functionality of the forum website to act as a continuing collaborative space with updated materials produced at the May 12 meeting, discussion forums, and video archives.
At the meeting it was noted that tools developed to support research are themselves successful products of the research process. The same is true of collaborative technology – those tools we are creating to assist in collaborative workflows are themselves enablers and subjects of discussion.