Improving the effectiveness of scientific software teams through collaborative learning.
BSSw Fellow Olivia Newton is organizing a workshop to produce an open knowledge base with tools to support and evaluate team learning in the interdisciplinary groups developing scientific software. Interdisciplinary group work in scientific software development is increasingly common as institutional initiatives aim to advance science through collaboration and technological innovation. These collaborations are created with the goal of solving problems that are complex in nature and thus benefit from the integration of varied forms of expertise and perspectives to produce software. Team learning has been identified as a key process for the performance and collaboration effectiveness of scientific teams. At the same time, facilitating this form of learning remains a challenge given the breadth of expertise that must be synthesized to effectively build knowledge. The products of the workshop will contribute to the collective understanding of collaborative learning in scientific software development, and also will be made open and usable to the relevant communities in service of better scientific software.
Olivia is a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Modeling, Simulation, and Training at the University of Central Florida. She is interested in modeling human and technical aspects of collaboration in science and engineering domains to enhance team effectiveness and promote equity in computational technologies.
