e-Research Infrastructure Development and Community Engagement UK e-Science All Hands Meeting Nottingham, Alex Voss,

Community Engagement  Two related JISC projects, started April’07  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

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

e-Uptake  Enabling Uptake of e-Infrastructure Services

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

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

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’

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)‏

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

 e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Ann Arbor, 7th-9th October (