eResearch Infrastructure Development and Community Engagement

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e-Research Infrastructure Development and
Community Engagement

• UK e-Science All Hands Meeting
• Nottingham, 13.09.2007
• Alex Voss, alex.voss_at_ncess.ac.uk

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Community Engagement

• Two related JISC projects, started April07
• Funded under the e-Infrastructure programme
  community engagement strand
• Aimed at widening uptake of e-Infrastructures
• Common approach to evidence gathering, similar
  analytic approaches but different outputs /
  interventions

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Understanding Widening Uptake

• Drawing on science and technology studies
• Early adopters - followers - late adopters (Not
  character types)
• Mutual shaping
• Sociotechnical alignment
• Path dependencies - lock-in
• Uneven distribution of costs benefits
• User-designer relations
• Designing interventions
• Based on understanding of drivers / barriers /
  enablers / alignment / beaten paths

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e-Uptake

• Enabling Uptake of e-Infrastructure Services

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Immediate Aims

• Consolidate understanding of user needs
• Identification of gaps in the training support
  needed
• Run training, education and outreach events
  across disciplines
• Create a repository of event information, support
  information and learning material

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Longer term

• Recommendations on how responses to barriers
  might be sustained and funded in the future
• Foster ongoing dialogue between service and
  technology providers, application developers and
  research communities

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Analysis

• Of barriers to uptake as well as enablers
• Through document reviews and fieldwork
  (interviews, surveys or direct observation)
• Static, linear description is not adequate as
  there is no one typology of issues
• Searchable along a number of dimensions
  (typologies and tags) through a web interface
• Better recipient design

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Intervention

• Through Training, Education and Outreach (TOE)
  Activities
• Series of workshops and training events in
  different application areas
• Development of training and support material for
  these communities
• UK one-stop-shop event information, support
  material and support contacts
• Crucially federation to community sites (e.g.,
  NCeSS, AHeSSC)

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Stakeholder Involvement

• Support through the communities of service
  providers, technology developers and users (of
  various stripes) is essential
• Review workshops to validate findings
• Overlap with other activities exists and creates
  additional requirements but also opportunities
• Aim is to foster an ongoing discourse that will
  last longer than the project itself

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• e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage
  Models

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Outputs

• Capturing patterns of use
• Transferable
• Inspiring examples
• Three different, but related outputs
• Experience Reports
• Use Cases
• Service Usage Models
• Key word here is traceability
• Easily searchable and consumable by stakeholders

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Collecting Evidence

• Gathering experience reports
• Semi-structured interviews guided by an interview
  framework.
• Identifies research area, research tasks, and
  tools and technologies used
• Fieldwork and producing short ethnographies of
  practice
• E.g. production of video vignettes
• Resource constraints practical agenda

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Use Cases

• Engaging stories about e-Infrastructure usage,
  tied back to more concrete experience reports
• Generalise over experience reports
• Make usage patterns more user friendly and
  transferable

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Use Cases Example
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Community Process

• Important aspect to achieve sustainability
• OSSwatch consultation explored the idea of
  forming a community around eIUS and e-Uptake.
• Users
• Contributors
• Committers

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Stakeholder Benefits

• Potential benefits to Service Providers
• Input for their own requirements analysis and
  user engagement activities
• More publicity for their services
• Get at how researchers use a particular service
• Understanding of how researchers join up services
  to achieve a particular goal

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Stakeholder Benefits (II)

• Potential benefits for researchers
• Learn about ways of using e-Infrastructure
• Find out what key decisions need to be made
• Find contacts peers, support, training
• Tell service providers about their ways of using
  e-Infrastructure

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Summary / Outlook

• Understand uptake as a complex social process
• Enable uptake through more targeted interventions
• Foster developments within communities rather
  than just offering technologies to them.
• Initial review and conceptual work and piloting
  of fieldwork
• Now developing strategies for the next stage,
  evidence gathering
• Work on technical outputs and planning events
• Next presentation e-Social Science 07 _at_ Ann
  Arbor, 7th-9th October (http//ess.si.umich.edu)