'Understanding Virtual Team Development' – a journal article that lays out the life cycle and core tasks of virtual teams. It was published in 2003 and summarizes much of the relevant literature; an important source.

Here's an article (in pdf) describing how to write a literature review for researchers in information sciences. The author states that I.S. is so new that most researchers don't have a clue about how to pull together a review of the scanty literature. Interesting. An upcoming issue of the journal will focus on the development of standards in IT. “IS researchers will face new challenges and opportunities in researching standards as the form and
pace of standardization will continue to undergo significant changes. Accordingly, research discourses relevant to standards research in IS will be necessarily expanded and will include innovation and organization theory, management of the IS function, economics of IT, and social implications of IT.”

Research on assessing the effectiveness of information systems. This site is associated with several others, including the Association for Information Systems and Qualitative Research in Information Systems. The latter site looks like a very valuable resource.

Training Tasters Decision help on using NVivo – reviews and samples.

Pushing the Limits of Qualitative Research with Qualrus
Presentation slides describing Qualrus. It looks neat, but
unfortunately Qualrus doesn't import spreadsheets – only text. Same
with Maxqda. The two leaders that import spreadsheet data appear to be
NVivo and Atlas.ti – the latter is releasing a version based on XML.

Home – WSS FAQ (beta)
MS SharePoint FAQs covering version 2 of SharePoint, which was just
released last week. There have been many major improvements to version
2. This FAQ site is hosted by Larry Strange of UnifiedWebMedia – he
specializes in SharePoint. An example of the FAQs:

In STS 1.0 there were problems accessing STS sites from Macs and by
users using Netscape browsers. I'm vague on the details but I seem to
remember that in addition to the need to use Basic Authentication there
was also some loss of features (i.e. some things didn't work). In
addition some older versions of IE didn't work entirely satisfactorily.

In WSS I've been told that (and this is a direct quote from inside MS – with my thanks to the sender)

“Any Windows, Macintosh®, or UNIX client can use Windows
SharePoint Services Beta 2 features, providing the client runs the
following software:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or later (best results with
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later), Microsoft Internet Explorer
5.2 or later for Macintosh, or Netscape Navigator version 6.2 or later
So we're including Mac and Unix running IE 5.01 or later and NS 6.2 or
later.”

Note: Linux Mozilla is not a supported Client browser.

TWiki – A Web Based Collaboration Platform Twiki is a collaborative web platform aimed at intranets. It's been recommended as a lightweight (less functional) alternative to MS SharePoint, and it's more accessible to a wide range of web browsers. Here's an overview of TWiki. TWiki can be used with a variety of different 'skins' (templates), like this one.

Virtual Collaboration: Enabling Product Teams and Communities – A Consortium Benchmarking Study Conducted by APQC : “The objectives of this consortium benchmarking study are to enable participants to develop a collaboration strategy for virtual teams and communities, understand the required roles and responsibilities for virtual collaboration, and learn approaches and tools that are being used to make a virtual team or community successful.” This is a summary of a proposal for a collaboration study of best practices.

AERA SIG Communication of Research :: Ejournals in Education: “Electronic Journals in the Field of Education
To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education.”

Here is an interesting web site called the “Collaborative learning environments sourcebook”. According to the website, “This is a sourcebook for academics and students who want to develop collaborative learning environments (or communities of practice) in which lecturers, students and others can work together to create new knowledge while learning new skills.”

Barnes & Noble.com – Virtual Teams That Work: Creating Conditions for Virtual Team Effectiveness The Harvard Business Review has recommended this book - here's the synopsis:

Virtual Teams that Work: Creating Conditions for Virtual Team Effectiveness
by Christina Gibson and Susan Cohen
Jossey-Bass, 2003

August 25, 2003

Managing virtual teams may be one of the most difficult challenges in this era. It’s hard enough to guide teams who can meet face-to-face, and whose members share common language and culture. But the difficulties multiply when teams go virtual: Suddenly communication is via technology and involves team members with far different life experiences. This volume, edited by colleagues at the University of Southern California’s Center for Effective Organizations, divide the issue into five topics: shared understanding, integration, and trust; people and context; leadership, knowledge management, and information sharing; implementing information technology; and processes and development. Issues addressed include how to compose and reward a virtual team, the development of leadership, and the strategic positioning of virtual teams within an organization. The final chapter summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of virtual teams and provides suggested best practices for virtual team effectiveness.

Analysis Open Ended Data Shows how to code and analyse interview data using simple spreadsheet if it's a small dataset. Nice intro to the subject.

CAQDAS The most appropriate qualitative software for our research (interview data, policy analysis, lliterature reviews, etc.) seem to be NVivo, MAXqda, Atlas.ti and Qualrus. They all cost between $680-$735 US for a single user (standard, not educational license). They are constantly being upgraded, so functions leapfrog each other; the latest versions tend to offer the ability to handle multiple file types rather than being restricted to plain text. The market leader appears to be NVivo.

D-Link DVC-1000 i2eye – Webcams – ZDNet Reviews For about $300 CAN, you can get a videoconferencing unit that works without a PC. It can sit on top of a television set and plug into a broadband connection. This might be useful for agency videoconferences or presentations, though the quality probably varies greatly with the status of the internet connection.

Story: How to troubleshoot a Windows meltdown – ZDNet Great article on how to troubleshoot Windows. Highly worth reading, and hanging on to. It describes how to locate, diagnose and fix system errors on your computer.

Privacy Legislation in Canada – Privacy Commissioner of Canada The Canadian “Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act” defines rules for how the private sector may collect, use or disclose personal information in the course of commercial activities. It becomes fully operational on January 1, 2004, and many businesses will not be ready to comply. The legislation doesn't apply to nonprofits and their fundraising, but nonprofits should consider making their practices consistent with the Act where possible. Otherwise, they risk public and donor backlash.

The Act in brief states, “Organizations covered by the Act must obtain an individual's consent when they collect, use or disclose the individual's personal information. The individual has a right to access personal information held by an organization and to challenge its accuracy, if need be. Personal information can only be used for the purposes for which it was collected. If an organization is going to use it for another purpose, consent must be obtained again. Individuals should also be assured that their information will be protected by specific safeguards, including measures such as locked cabinets, computer passwords or encryption.”

FQS 3(2) Gibbs, Friese & Mangabeira: The Use of New Technology in Qualitative Research. Introduction to Issue 3(2) of FQS Very good overview of qualitative software, linked to several associated articles with specific approaches. Also see this list of software that provides qualitative text analysis. The most interesting software is Qualrus, in that it uses 'artificial intelligence' to guess at codes, and links concepts together based on their co-occurence in the texts. However, the real challenge will be how Microsoft's new OneNote will compete with lightweight qualitative analyses of unstructured data.

Software for News Analysis (Assessment and Development of New Methods for the Analysis of Media Content) We're experimenting with various qualitative research methods for policy and evaluation studies. We currently use http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/software/ez-text.htm, which is a free and lightweight program offered by the Centers for Disease Control. It's designed for field-based researchers using a variety of different computers, and the interview data can easily be combined into a database for coding. It's nice for collecting data, but clumsy for coding. The full-power CDC analytic software, Answr, is also free but terrifyingly complex. Every time I open it to evaluate it, I panic. Not only me, either. One possible approach is Qualrus, of which more later.

Conquer Information Overload I spend hours every week searching for documents, articles, emails and attachments, and I keep looking for better solutions. Right now I use Nelson Email Organizer (from Caelo) to manage my current Outlook email, and it's wonderful. I've also been using 80-20 Retriever to search through documents and archived email, but it slows down my system and crashes it too often. So this article from PC Mag reviewing desktop search engines is really relevant. Unhappily, it recommends 80-20, which has just tied up my computer for the past 4 hours indexing emails. I'm going to try IdeaLab's X1 program (review is here, web site is here). The basic version is free unlike the other programs, and the advanced version is only $50 US. If that doesn't work, I'll try dtSearch, also reviewed in the above PC Mag article.

Project Planning: Fuzziness = Failure “Studies of exceptional project managers in fast time-to-market industries show that the initial phase of a complex project, often referred to as the fuzzy front end, has a disproportionately large impact on the end results. All the recommendations that follow flow from one counterintuitive insight: The traditional operational focus of project management will doom a complex project.”