IGCC 2014 - Workshop: Interdisciplinary Coups to Calamities

Successful interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to Web Science, yet surprisingly little guidance exists about how to reach across disciplines and achieve successful collaborations. The fast pace of both academic and practitioner workplaces limits the possibilities for mindful reflection about success factors in this complex area. This workshop aims to provide such a space and generate insights relevant to the whole community, particularly newcomers and those communities with whom Web Scientists wish to connect.
This workshop offers the opportunity to share and reflect on experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration: from the outstanding to disastrous, and from the surprising to the confusing. If you have ever reached across disciplines and felt there was some lesson to be learned afterwards - whether you had time to reflect on it or not - this is the workshop for you.
Attendees of this workshop will each have time to share a brief summary of their collaboration, what happened, and why. We will generate keywords for each attendee's contribution and use a group working session to find parallels, discrepancies and unexpected insights across the collaborations. We will identify key issues (and possible solutions) in interdisciplinary work, yielding insights for the Web Science community regarding the common issues we face and practical approaches to combat these.
Goals and structure of workshop
Our previous Special Interest Group on this topic (a SIG at CHI: see 'background') only began to scratch the surface of this key area that is central to Web Science research and practice. The outputs of the SIG were unstructured and informal, and this workshop seeks to build on those initial insights and enthusiasm. Our goal is to collate people's experiences of interdisciplinary work, both positive and negative, in order to begin to identify success and failure factors in such collaborations. Outputs will include:
A collection of interdisciplinary collaboration experiences from workshop participants
A list of factors that led to those successes and failures
A first pass at a taxonomy of these experiences
Encompassing multiple disciplinary perspectives and methods is a serious challenge and it is difficult to maintain conferences that fairly review and host contributions from multiple disciplines: as such, we anticipate that the workshop outputs will be relevant not only to individuals seeking to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries and groups who are already engaging in such endeavours, but also the wider WebSci community, including future WebSci conference organisers.
The Web Science community is richly diverse, with multiple interdisciplinary endeavours. Many researchers struggle - understandably - with the issues that interdisciplinary work can bring. It is clear that discerning appropriate methodologies for interdisciplinary work (and appropriate peer review mechanisms for such work) is non-trivial. In this workshop we hope to strengthen the community of people actively engaging in such activity, and identify key issues and possible solutions that span interdisciplinary work.