Communications of the ACM
Tool Boosts Success of Online Collaborations By Redistributing the Burdens of Leadership
Credit: paulamau.com
Carnegie Mellon University researcher Kurt Luther has developed Pipeline, an open source tool designed to help leaders finish complex, collaborative projects by redistributing leadership responsibilities. Luther says Pipeline makes it easier to assign, critique, and track the progress of individual tasks within a project and makes it easy for leaders to delegate responsibility to others.
Pipeline also enables project leaders to designate different levels of trust to specific individuals, giving up a degree of authority in return for greater accountability. "As a leader, I can trust someone to make decisions on my behalf on some portion of the project, but if that person makes a mistake, I can see it," says Luther, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute who developed Pipeline as a Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute of Technology. He notes Pipeline works in a middle ground between a traditional hierarchical organization and a wiki Web site.
Pipeline also includes systems to streamline management. Luther says Pipeline could be used to create a "marketplace" of projects and collaborative communities could incorporate it into their websites.
From Carnegie Mellon News
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