Supporting a Multidisciplinary Digital Media Research Community with GRAND Aspirations

The challenges of managing a nationwide "network of centres of excellence" (NCE) are being explored by GRAND, a Canadian NCE comprising over 350 researchers from technical disciplines, social sciences, humanities and the arts within 34 interwoven projects focusing on all aspects of digital media. A complex web of relationships with funding agencies, private and public partners, and researchers is being managed using a purpose-built web-based platform (the GRAND Forum) that supports communication and collaboration across communities. The Forum explicitly represents multiple roles of individuals within the organization through formal and informal user-centred workflows that reflect both symmetric (peer-to-peer) and asymmetric (hierarchical) organizational structures. We describe the principles of each.