e-uptake: widening uptake of e-infrastructure services
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e-Uptake: widening uptake of e-Infrastructure Services. Marzieh Asgari-Targhi, Alex Voss, Rob Procter et al . ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science. Session Overview. About the e-Uptake Project Literature Review and Fieldwork Typology and Repository of Findings - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
e-Uptake: widening uptake ofe-Infrastructure Services
Marzieh Asgari-Targhi, Alex Voss, Rob Procter et al.
ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science
Session Overview
About the e-Uptake Project Literature Review and Fieldwork Typology and Repository of Findings Fostering e-Infrastructures From User-Designer Relations to
Community Engagement
JISC Community Engagement
e-Uptake
Led by the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science in collaboration with the National e-Science Centre and the Arts & Humanities e-Science Support Centre.
Remit: to widen the uptake of e-Research across all disciplines through research and intervention
Stakeholders: existing and potential service and technology providers, researchers, funders, etc.
Part 1: Literature Review and Fieldwork
Overview
Issues identified in the e-Science and innovation studies literature
Investigation of issues and enablers through fieldwork
Validation of existing knowledge and generating new findings
Existing Themes (I) The following major areas have been identified in the
literature: What exactly constitutes e-infrastructure? Technology
+ social arrangements Can we ‘build’ infrastructures or do we ‘foster’ them? What does advanced computing offer science and
engineering as well as social sciences or arts and humanities? Are there common themes?
How can e-Research be ‘embedded’ in practice and in education?
Integration of e-Infrastructure components into a coherent whole.
Existing Themes (II)
Data and related issues; accessing, curating, protection, sharing, standardising, security and confidentiality issues, etc.
Collaboration between application scientists & developers, what motivates people and how can it be made to work across distance and boundaries?
Global communities: how do we maximise the use of e-Infrastructures and applications to support new forms of scientific community?
Existing Themes (III)
e-Research is inherently multi-disciplinary. Funding: Attracting funding for multi-disciplinary
research in e-infrastructure is difficult Organisational framework: How strategic
investments and enabling policy can be combined to form an effective organisational framework?
Socio-ethical issues, how do we tackle the ethical and policy issues surrounding the use of e-Research?
Existing Themes (IV)
Legal issues, e.g., IPR, data protection Spectrum of architectures runs from
centrally organised and controlled to networks or linked systems
Managing local autonomy while providing reliable and predictable services
Measuring the success of e-Research and rewarding it.
Studying Uptake, Barriers & Enablers
Look beyond isolated, anecdotal, contingent or random problems
Aim to uncover recurring, widespread barriers that can be overcome by targeted interventions
Must reflect the diversity of the target population, their different interests and possible uses of services
Must sample adopters, non-adopters and service providers
Evidence E-Uptake has conducted 50+ interviews About 25 hours of audio + questionnaire data Fieldwork continuing & approach being reviewed Interviews being transcribed and coded Metadata being applied and questionnaire data added Building up a body of evidence and a typology of findings Online repository of evidence of barriers and enablers Analysis of training requirements based on existing
longitudinal data collection
Coverage So Far
Underrepresentation, e.g., of research fellows Level of awareness about 68% - bias towards early
adopters Next rounds of fieldwork will try to address this and will
try to falsify emerging explanations of adoption processes, barriers and enablers
Training Requirements
Existing training requirements data (AHM, EGEE conferences, etc. – note bias in sample…)
Training Requirements (II)
Clear need for education, outreach and training on principles of e-Research
Training provision currently patchy Question of timing, need to engage people
when they are ready to make the next step Need to tailor interventions to different
communities
Part 2: Coding, Typology, Repository of Findings
e-Research Tools Analytical approach being developed and
CAQDAS tools (Atlas.ti, NVivo, etc.) considered Interested in:
Non-proprietary file formatsSupport for collaborative work Integration of qualitative, quantitative and meta-dataDynamic online presentation in a number of different
forms for different stakeholdersComplex queriesSemi-automatic markup, meta-data generation and
anonymisation
SQUAD
We are currently exploring use of SQUAD Smart Qualitative Data: Methods and
Community Tools for Data Mark-Up Based on TEI – an XML application Consequently: open & extensible http://quads.esds.ac.uk/projects/squad.asp
e-Research Tools
Coding
Coding scheme initially based on earlier literature review
Being iteratively modified as analysis progresses Hierarchical scheme with currently 166 codes Link between formulations of barriers and
evidence base [Demo visual representation…]
Gathering and Analysing Evidence
Need to improve evidence gathering in the community
Current JISC community engagement activities provide a snapshot
Make data collection more routine Turn evidence to insight to action Use e-Research tools to facilitate this…
Part 3: Fostering e-Infrastructures
Embedding e-Infrastructures
As e-Infrastructure matures technically, the need to address issues of uptake and embedding in working practices becomes critical.
The Nature of e-Infrastructures e-Infrastructures are complex socio-technical
ensembles which are ‘fostered’ rather than ‘built’.
Changing the ‘social infrastructure’ requires interventions not traditionally associated with engineering and design.
These interventions are needed at different scales: local, organisational, national, international.
e-Infrastructure will not be sustained unless the technical and social infrastructures are aligned.
Fostering e-Infrastructures
Drawing on the findings, approaches and methods developed in other disciplines
Essentially an inter-disciplinary effort. Relevant expertise exists:
software engineering,social sciences (e.g., sociology, social anthropology,
economics),workplace studies (as in CSCW and PD),science and technology studies, philosophy of
science.
Fostering e-Infrastructures
Involvement from these disciplines has often been sporadic, marginal and too late rather than fundamental and strategic.
Aim for a more fundamental involvement in community engagement:studying working practices and uptake, building conceptual models and deriving policies,devising plans for widening and deepening adoption through targeted interventions, e.g., training,
education, outreach, consultancy or user forums
Operationalising Lessons Learned
We need to find ways to operationalise lessons learned and make them part of the normal way of working for people working in e-Research.
The challenge lies in making approaches scale: from single systems to distributed infrastructures, to collaborative work in communities, Involving heterogeneous and independent actors.
Part 4: From User-Designer Relations to Community
Engagement
Models of Innovation
Linear: diffusion from laboratory into society – ‘build it and they will come’
Feedback and innovation in useSocio-technical systemsImportance of local knowledge and practicesUsers as stakeholders and expertsDesigners as moderators/facilitators as well
as technical expertsConfigurations
User-Designer Relations
Need familiarity with the working practices and concerns of researchersResearchers need to understand what is possible, what is feasible and what is not, what the tradeoff between different options areInvolves a degree of familiarity with the research domain and e-Research technologies. This can be achieved through:
Training (e.g., bioinformatics, Grid literacy) Boundary spanning (e.g., researchers employed on projects) Facilitation (e.g., consultancy, focus groups, workplace studies) Shared practice (co-location, embedding, corealisation)
Issues
Traditional user engagement works:in small groupsin relatively homogeneous groupswith (practically) aligned interestsin the design of well-described systemsserving well-defined purposes
Issues (II)
e-Infrastructures for research challenge this: loosely coupled groups of peoplewith only partially and temporarily aligned interestsmultidisciplinarity and scale of collaborationproblem of identifying possible adoptersand engaging themrepresentativenessgeneric vs. specific functionality & supportconfigurations, not systems
…to Community Engagement
Managing user-designer relations beyond individual projects
Scaling to community level Developing paths to adoption and mechanisms to facilitate uptake to widen uptake from ‘early adopters’ to
the ‘interested’, to get the ‘disengaged’ interested and to convince the ‘sceptical’.
Paths to Wider Uptake
Grand ChallengesCapacity Computing / GridExceptional workBespoke functionality
Web 2.0Social GridEveryday workCommon tools
Paths to Wider Uptake
Grand ChallengesCapacity Computing / GridExceptional workBespoke functionality
Web 2.0Social GridEveryday workCommon tools
Embedded e-ResearchCorealisationRoutine innovationFunctionality Mashup*
*Charles Severance
Intervention
Closing the gaps between stages of engagement:
cf. EGEE Virtuous Cycle Also OSS-Watch model
Community Engagement (II)
Interventions: outreach, education, training, consultancy
These elements need to be tied together Lack of an obvious (single) point of contact Need a professional triage service?
Tracking Developments
Community Engagement: Mapping
Establish baseline understanding of e-Science communities: people, projects, activities and relationships.
e-Uptake is using web-mining to harvest information from research council websites, conference proceedings, etc, map of e-Science communities and track engagement over time.
Mixed Methods
Need to employ a mixture of methods for data collection, engagement, requirements negotiation and validation
Interviews establish existence of issues Design ethnographies provides detailed
understanding Surveys establish relevance across a wider
population Particular set of skills falls between computer
science and social sciences
Programme – Project Relations
Effective community engagement is expensive, therefore best done at programme level
Have common approach to common issues so projects can focus in specifics
Raises the questions of programme – project relations
Need to coordinate between project-level and programme-level activities
Sustained funding for these activities
Programme – Project Relations (II)
For example:Community engagement projects have
common framework of understandingCommon consent process enabling data
sharingCoordinated approach to identifying
candididate respondents, doing interviews, managing data and analysis
Common dissemination activities