Avoiding Lessons Re-Learned in Collaboration Experimentation

Collaboration experimentation in the Department of Defense DoD has rapidly grown over the past few decades. This fact has been highlighted by the emergence of several collaboration systems and tool suites used among various communities within the DoD. Some of the collaboration products available today include the Defense Collaboration Tool Suite DCTS, InfoWorkSpace IWS, and Groove. Over the last five to ten years, the authors at one Navy laboratory have had the opportunity to work together, either independently or in small 2 to 3-person teams, on various stages of the research process for several Navy, Marine Corps, and Joint projects exploring collaboration. These projects often conducted experiments on problem sets framed in a variety of Command and Control scenarios with real warfighters using different collaboration systems and tool suites. From the authors experiences they have discerned several re-occurring themes suitable for lessons learned that have evolved a practical set of guidelines for making collaboration in experiments a more rewarding and humanizing experience for the participants. The sharing of these observations and practices with other researchers and organizations in their exploration of collaboration may help them to avoid the relearning of collaboration lessons learned.