About Me
I'm a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information and a Visiting Scholar at the Arizona State University School of Public Affairs. I study the building of bridges, social media use in organizations, and newcomers to geographically distributed teams in order to understand how distributed work gets done and how social computing technologies are engaged in that work. I'm especially interested in learning that takes place when people work together. I aim to contribute new ways of thinking about distributed work, learning in collaboration, and the roles of social computing in both. You can read more about my work in posts tagged "research" and on the Research page.
My dissertation, Building Bridges: A Study of Coordination in Projects, tells the story of how various professionals worked together to build a bridge that contains a novel building material. I use data from that bridge project to develop the concept of adaptive capacity - a set of abilities a project team accumulates that allows them to adjust their work to manage uncertain and unpredictable changes in their environment.
When I'm not working on my research, I'm probably cooking, trying to fix my Mac, or learning about bicycles. I work on consulting and social media development projects as the CEO of Research at Work (RAW Labs). I'm also the founder of Many Flyers and developer of Tweeteorology.
I'm still getting to know Phoenix. I'm trying to use my car as little as possible, and the new Metro Light Rail is my primary mode of transportation. Now that I'm learning how to fix bicycles, courtesy of the friendly folks at the Bike Saviours Co-op in Tempe, I'm riding more and more.