Trust Management - Building Trust for International Cross Disciplinary Collaboration on Climate Change

Abstract:

Successful communication and collaboration entails mutual understanding, and transfer, of information. The risk of misunderstanding and/or miscommunication between collaborating groups is tackled in different ways around the globe; some are well documented whereas others may be unknown outside particular groups, whether defined geographically or by specialism. For example; in some countries legally binding contracts define the terms of collaboration. Some regions place greater emphasis on developing trust relationships, and sometimes an official agreement is implied, such as many electronic data transfers on the web.

International collaboration on climate change increasingly involves electronic data exchange (e.g. open access publications, shared documents, data repositories etc.) and with this increased reliance on electronic data a need has arisen for scientists to collaborate both internationally and cross-disciplinarily particularly with information technology and data management specialists. Trust of data and metadata on the internet (e.g. privacy, legitimacy etc.) varies, possibly due to a lack of internationally agreed standards for data governance and management, leaving many national, regional and institutional practices tailored to the needs of that group only.

It is proposed that building trust relationships between cross-disciplinary and international groups could help facilitate further communication, understanding and benefits from the relationship, while still maintaining independence as separate groups. Complex international cross-disciplinary group relationship dynamics are not easily mapped and producing a set of trust building rules that can be applied to any current and future collaboration with equal validity may be unfeasible. An alternative to such a set of rules may be found in a Trust Manager, whose role is to improve mutually beneficial knowledge exchange between groups, build trust and increase future collaborative potential. This presentation will report on the potential of trust management to improve international cross disciplinary climate change collaboration.