The costs and capabilities of information technology are improving by orders of magnitude every decade, but we are only beginning to understand the opportunities these changes provide for new ways of organizing human activity and new kinds of technology to help people work together. The new MIT Center for Coordination Science conducts multidisciplinary research to help understand these possibilities better. Research in the center draws upon many parts of MIT and ongoing projects in a variety of fields, including: computer science, organization theory, psychology, information systems, management science, and economics. We believe that a powerful source of intellectual leverage on questions about how groups of people can use computers will result from a better understanding of the nature of coordination. Therefore, work in the center focuses on how coordination can occur, both with and without technology. The center includes projects in the following areas: Coordination technology - designing and studying innovative computer systems that help people work together in small or large groups (e.g., “groupware”, “computer-supported cooperative work”, and “electronic markets”). Organizational structures and information technology - observing, analyzing, and predicting how information technology affects organizational structures and processes and how organizations can use information technology more effectively. Coordination theory - developing and testing theories about how the activities of separate actors can be coordinated. These theories are expected to draw upon and illuminate coordination among people and also coordination in distributed or parallel processing computer systems. In addition to research projects in these areas, the Center also sponsors seminars, workshops, working papers, and conferences.
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