Distributed Collaboration in a Virtual World: Technology, Culture and Communication Practices

Emerging technologies present new ways of conducting virtual work, allowing increasingly tightly-coupled, distributed collaboration. This study investigated team practices that supported tightly-coupled, synchronous, distributed collaboration, focusing on the role of team cultural and technological factors in creating situational challenges and of communication practices in overcoming them. We drew on an interactive perspective on culture to analyze the practices of a volunteer, software development team engaged in tightly-coupled, collaboration in a virtual world. We found that in addition to universal cultural team challenges suggested by the literature, the team we studied encountered situational challenges derived from their unique purpose and the affordances and barriers presented by the particular technology they used. We identified three communication practices the team developed to overcome these challenges: (1) articulation of presence, (2) articulation of experience, and (3) articulation of acti...