Virtual organizations: Team Science, Team Shakespeare

Virtual Organizations An increasing artifact of the landscape of scientific research, largely from the cost complex nature of the new instruments and growing data sets Always inter-institutional, frequently international Having a “mission” in teaching and a need for administration Tend to cluster around unique global scale facilities and instruments Heavily reflected in agency solicitations and peer review processes Being seen now in the arts and humanities

Virtual Organizations as seen by NSF OCI A virtual organization is a group of individuals whose members and resources may be dispersed geographically, yet who function as a coherent unit through the use of cyberinfrastructure. Virtual organizations may be known by a range of names, including: collaboratories, distributed work groups, virtual teams, online communities, and science gateways.   Distributed across space, with participants spanning localities and institutions; Distributed across time, allowing synchronous as well asynchronous interactions; Dynamic structures and processes, at every stage of the organizational lifecycle; Computationally enabled, via collaboration support systems including e-mail, teleconferencing, telepresence, awareness, social computing, and group information management tools; and, Computationally enhanced, with simulations, databases, instrumentation, analytic tools and services which facilitate interaction with human affiliates that are integral to the functioning of the organization.

Virtual Organization Characteristics Distributed across space Distributed across time Dynamic management structures Collaboratively enabled Computationally enhanced

Building Effective Virtual Organizations A workshop run by NSF in January 2008 to give many newly minted VO’s the wisdom of the ages Cross directorate with OCI catalytic A few very insightful talks Was intended to cover the complex social and economic issues as well as some common technical issues, but veered towards collaboration chaos… http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/events/VirtOrg2008/

Virtual Organization Drivers (VOSS) A growing shift away from traditions of individual based science toward more collaborative models. The intellectual challenges and institutional conditions of 21st century science and engineering necessitate  collaboration. In many fields, scholars are confronted with challenges of a scale and complexity that defy the boundaries of traditional fields as well as the limits of individual capacity. Many scientists and engineers find themselves today working in collaborations, many of which cross disciplinary, institutional, and geographic borders via the support of cyberinfrastructure. http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08550/nsf08550.htm

VOSS interests Units and frameworks of analysis—both social and technical      Organizational life cycles Production and innovation: What technological, social, and legal arrangements support intellectual production and innovation in virtual organizations?   Organizational structure, scope, and scaling   Individual and collective motivation Management, Governance, and Leadership Measurement and assessment Comparative performance: Under what conditions do virtual organizations outperform co-located organizations? What tasks or processes can be done or done better by virtual organizations that cannot be done or done as well in co-located organizations, and vice versa? What are the advantages and disadvantages of technological-mediation? Under what conditions (and how) might virtual organizations be instrumented to advance our understanding of certain phenomena better than co-located organizations?

NSF Datanet Develop the new methods, management structures and technologies to manage the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and data streams New types of organizations envisioned in this solicitation will integrate library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise. provide reliable digital preservation, access, integration, and analysis capabilities for science and/or engineering data over a decades-long timeline; continuously anticipate and adapt to changes in technologies and in user needs engage at the frontiers of computer and information science and cyberinfrastructure serve as component elements of an interoperable data preservation and access network. http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503141&org=OCI

Comanage A collaboration management platform, supported in part by a NSF OCI grant, being developed by the Internet2 community, with Stanford as a lead institution Well-behaved applications externalize their identity management dimensions to an general identity/group/privilege/etc repository (LDAP, MySQL, etc.) Users manage IdM in a collaboration-centric way, not in a tool-centric way Uses Shibboleth, Grouper, and Signet Open source, open protocol

Domesticated applications Applications that externalize their identity management dimensions Domestication typically goes in stages – first identity, then group and privilege management, then provisioning Domestication relative to the external access protocols (SAML, LDAP, MySQL, web services, etc.) Applications done or being targeted Sympa, Confluence, Asterisk (open-source IP audioconferencing), Dim-Dim (open-source web meeting), Bedeworks (federated open-source calendar), Subversion, JIRA, Al fresco Finally domain science resources – Instrument, Grids

Collaboration Management Platform (CMP) and the Attribute Ecosystem Collaboration Tools/ Resources File Sharing Calendar Email List Manager Phone/ Video Conference Federated Wiki Domain Science Grid Domain Science Instrument Application Attributes C o manage Collaboration Management Platform Authorization – Group Info Authorization – Privilege Info Authentication People Picker Other Functions Attribute/Resource Info Data Store Attribute Ecosystem Flows Laboratory X Home Org & Id Providers/ Sources of Authority University A University B Sources of Authority

Two specimen VO’s LIGO-GEO-VIRGO (www.ligo.org) Ocean Observing Initiative (http://www.joiscience.org/ocean_observing) Interests include federated identity, COmanage, and domain science use Both have international characteristics

Lessons Learned Collaborate externally; compete internally Time zones are hell Big turf issue of the local VO sysadmin Many of the instruments are black-boxes Physical access controls matter Scientific accomplishments and egos