COI Columbia University 803 International Affairs MC 3355 420 West 118th St NY, NY 10027 212-854-5999 (P) 212-854-8925 (F) coi-iserp@columbia.edu COI promotes research on organizational innovation as well as new forms of collaboration, communication, and coordination made possible with the advent of interactive technologies. At mid-century, organizational analysts at Columbia University, including Peter Blau, Alvin Gouldner, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Robert Merton, charted the rise of bureaucratic organizations and the emergence of mass communication through case studies of work groups and the demographics of audience reception. At our century's turn, we have the opportunity to chart the emergence of collaborative organizational forms in an era of interactive media. The social engineers of the collaborative age are software engineers, interactive designers, and information architects; a critical social science perspective suggests that realizing the innovative potential of the new interactive media will require extending design capabilities to communities of users in a process of emergent design. COI affiliates represent multiple disciplines including sociology, anthropology, interactive design, computer science, organizational studies, communications, urban planning, science studies, and journalism. COI is one of eight centers at Columbia's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP). The Institute's core mission is to catalyze and produce pioneering social science research and to shape public policy by integrating knowledge and methods across the social science disciplines.