Multi-disciplinary science teams face conceptual and practical challenges conducting their research. Creating cross-project understanding, i.e. distributed or shared cognition, manifests in ways such as common understanding of project goals, cross-disciplinary communication, and co-creating new knowledge, the ‘task work’. Practical challenges include administrative activities like scheduling meetings, tracking progress, generating reports, and on/off-boarding team members, the ‘team work’. Teams that are able to create, implement and use information infrastructure to address these challenges may be better positioned to achieve their objectives. The question remains, though, what information infrastructure, how to deploy and how to use. This paper will describe the development and implementation of information infrastructure, called the Knowledge Framework (KF), in the CHEER (Coastal Hazards, Equity, Economic Prosperity & Resilience Hub) project led by the University of Delaware. This paper will apply the concept of sociotechnical assemblage to analyze a collection of information technologies, boundary objects, roles, and processes being integrated as part of the CHEER KF.

Funded as part of NSF’s Coastlines and People (CoPe) program, the five-year CHEER project brings together approximately 50 members distributed across scientific, technical, professional domains, and geography. With a goal to understand and quantify the relationships and tradeoffs between equity, economic prosperity, and natural hazard resilience among households under different policy alternatives, the research is organized around six research thrusts working together developing a computational framework to model these interconnected effects. The research thrusts include, Hazards, Buildings, Economy, Households, and Government with a cross-cutting integration activity as the sixth thrust. In addition to providing cross-project knowledge management, the CHEER KF is envisaged as a complement to the CHEER computational framework.

Team science work argues that technology may be recognized as an additional member of the science team for the ways in which it supports both team work and task work. Sociotechnical assemblages, as used in the literature of sociotechnical studies, broadens this idea to recognize that the technology used in these contexts is more than hardware and software, but are networks of individuals, technologies, and artifacts that become mutually substantiated in the context of an activity or actor network. The assemblages include formal and informal roles for individuals and technologies, as well as processes and configuration work.

This paper will describe the existing CHEER knowledge framework and its development outlining progress, challenges encountered, and future directions. The authors are members of the CHEER team and are responsible for developing the CHEER Knowledge Framework and are, therefore, well-placed to describe the process and outcomes to date. Approaching the role of technology in teams as a sociotechnical assemblage may improve practical understanding and in a reciprocal manner enrich the theoretical understanding in team science and sociotechnical studies.