In this new article presented at the ACM Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, we introduce the CoSo app (Collaborative Sonar) for large-scale collection of collaboration data within team ecosystems. The acquisition of passive social data through digital traces can be limited and often needs to be supplemented by qualitative approaches such as surveys or self-reported data. However, collecting relational surveys at scale poses challenges both in terms of human deployment and technical issues, as it involves probing the interactions relevant to an individual (for example, their team members). To address this need, we developed the CoSo (Collaborative Sonar) platform.

CoSo consists of a mobile application in which individuals can respond to questionnaires and document the activities they perform in a logbook. Additionally, an online platform allows study administrators to create a program with participants and teams, create and distribute questionnaires including questions about interactions with other team members or with other teams, and view response rates and obtained network data in real-time. This application has collected over 15,000 responses from 1,323 individuals in 227 teams to date and has been used to measure the temporal dynamics of collaborative relationships and their impact on performance in the open innovation program Crowd4SDG funded by the European Union. A longitudinal study is currently underway in the context of the iGEM scientific competition.