Project Purpose
The purpose of this project is to contribute to an enhanced, interdisciplinary, understanding of the sociotechnical factors and dynamics influencing the effectiveness of virtual organizations. The project uses a stratified purposeful sample of ten virtual organizations, chosen to illustrate a variety of diverse characteristics of organizational type, including: membership composition, size, boundary definition, function, duration, origin, and funding. The sample includes, but goes beyond virtual organizations in science and engineering, to encompass networks of social and behavioral scientists; corporate teams, transnational civil society organizations, and disability advocates.

Project Goals
Three critical goals define the project.

1. The first goal is to conduct a comparative mixed-methods meta-analysis of five existing virtual organizations in our sample with data collected using similar instruments. The results of this interdisciplinary meta-analysis will suggest a consensual conceptual model for analyzing, categorizing, and evaluating the effectiveness of virtual organizational structures. This sample of virtual organizations includes numerous types including: corporate; social; behavioral; and economic scientists; transnational civil society; university administrators; and disability advocates.
2. The second goal is to validate the conceptual model that is suggested by the meta-analysis using data from five additional existing organizations, and then re-testing the model on the entire sample to look for model fit variability.
3. Finally, the third goal is to disseminate the results of this model to a broad, interdisciplinary research community. These results will include: a web-based ontology of factors affecting virtual organizations; the meta-analysis results; proposed, tested, and retested model of virtual organization effectiveness; and any interorganizational differences that should be examined for future model refinement.

How it Works 
The two-year project is organized into four distinct phases:

• Phase 1 - Spring 2009: Level Setting Amongst the Team and Ontology Development – Because our team is, by design, highly interdisciplinary, the first phase of the project will focus on developing a common nomenclature and understanding of the sample of ten virtual organizations and networks under analysis in the project.
• Phase 2 - Summer 2009: Comparative Mixed-Methods Meta-Analysis and Model Development – In this phase, all of the disparate qualitative, quantitative, and social network data from the virtual organizations in the sample will be combined for comparative mixed methods meta-analysis.
• Phase 3 - Fall 2009 / Spring 2010: Model Testing and Instrument Design – Based on the meta-analysis and model development in Phase 2, Phase 3 utilizes the newly aggregated data set to reinterpret the virtual organization data and to test the model.
  
• Phase 4 - Summer / Fall 2010: Evaluation and Dissemination – In this final phase, we will conduct a summative evaluation of the project (the formative evaluation will take place at the conclusion of each phase).