Led by Lou Woodley with support from Martin Storksdieck, the STEM Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) had partnered to develop a research program that examined the processes by which scientific teams organize, communicate, and collaborate through online platforms, namely the AAAS Trellis site.
Trellis was a brand new platform that enabled scientific groups of any size, discipline, and location to come together for the purposes of discussion and knowledge sharing. Studying Trellis from its early stages provided a rare opportunity to observe how new teams are created online and how existing teams respond to using a new set of tools.
The aim of the project was to understand which platform-mediated practices facilitate or hinder research collaborations, co-construction of knowledge and social learning mediated. The study of online science communities was seen as specifically useful in understanding collaborative processes across institutional and national boundaries and how such teams coordinate to achieve scientific milestones. The research was expected to contribute to the relatively new interdisciplinary ‘science of team science’ field emerging from the National Institutes of Health and recently addressed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in a 2015 synthesis report Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science.
Changes in strategic directions at AAAS led to the discontinuation of Trellis in its original form. AAAS is now operating a community site. The scholarship on and support for team science continues at https://www.cscce.org/.
