Collaboration Signatures: Tracking Long-Horizon Dynamics of Cross-Meeting Collaboration Networks

Shengqi Zhu, Sheshera Mysore, Bahareh Sarrafzadeh

Enterprise platforms have received increasing attention as a core component of social networks and the Web. However, existing work mostly relies on fragmented logs of small units of work, like emails and chats, and focuses on who connects with whom without sufficient account of collaboration content and dynamics. This work systematically explores tracking collaborations across sequences of meetings as a new approach to interpreting their long-horizon dynamics. Linking 45,426 meetings in a large multinational technology company based on full transcripts and 1.6 million extracted agenda items, we establish a cross-meeting collaboration network of 6,065 collaborations. The network recovers the natural shapes of workplace collaborations: meetings, as snapshots of ongoing collaboration, link into largely tree-shaped structures, while the work content forms nested directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Further, we explore how these networks evolve over time, examining three established perspectives: task division, team composition, and temporal continuity. Each explains part of the dynamics but does not capture the distinctness of long-horizon workplace collaboration: e.g., work flows in a…