VOA3R Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository: sharing scientific and scholarly research related to agriculture, food, and environment PRESENTER’S NAME & CONTACT DETAILS User Requirements for the VOA3R platform

OBJECTIVES the VOA3R platform who are the stakeholders what are their requirements identify requirements validate requirements document and organise requirements

VOA3R (co-)funding ICT Policy Support Programme aims at stimulating innovation and competitiveness through wider uptake and best use of ICT by citizens, governments and businesses.

The VOA3R platform Key objectives: Improve the spread of European agriculture and aquaculture research results by using an innovative approach to sharing open access research products a federation approach that integrates existing open access repositories and scholarly publication management systems Main innovation Social portal Community-focused integrated service

Key features open access, research and analysis highly specific literature analysis formulate searches in personal fields facilitate open access publishing preprint publishing, informal feedback, different forms of peer evaluation and post- archival assessment communities of practice ratings, public reviews, suggestions experts online identity and reputation

Social search Social search help you discover relevant content from your social circle, a set of peers and contacts. content from your peers and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers

Object-Centered sociality

Access, publish, organise, socialise!

An old story... As early as the 1970s! “Surveying the national scientific and technological potential, including the collection and processing of data management, of the R&D system”. (UNESCO, Paris 1970, 251 p.) “Study report on the feasibility of a world science information system” (UNISIST, Paris, 1971, 161 p. - Synopses) 1987, 1 st Conference on European Research Databases

THE VOA 3 R STAKEHOLDERS’ USER REQUIREMENTS

Requirements analysis main activities Eliciting requirements: communicating with stakeholders and users determine what their requirements are. Analyzing requirements: unclear, incomplete, contradictory requirements resolve these issues. Recording requirements: such as natural-language documents, use cases, user stories, process specifications, etc. Validating & Prioritising requirements

Stakeholder participation Requirements analysis is a communication problem Participation is important! Great level of improvement Conversation & Confirmation … BUT … Having a problem does not uniquely qualify to solve it: ”It hurts when I go like this...” We need to stop asking users Rather ask them to participate in effect... work together!

Who are the stakeholders? Researchers Academics Practitioners Students Librarians, Editors Decision makers the Industry and other organisations but also: the anonymous web surfer and certainly: Other systems and services! Producers Consumers External systems Producers Consumers External systems

TASKS Identify stakeholders Analyse the use of current systems by different user categories Use partners’ experience with existing systems and last, but not least... ask the Stakeholders

The producers’ needs Publishing research online pre- and post-publish support peer-reviewing → model the scholarly process Make research items more accessible Support post-publication assessment Foster post-publication dialogue Electronic CV

The consumers’ needs Information retrieval open access open limits heterogeneous content locate, search / semantic search browse Information processing layers of links online reading: annotations, bookmarks, reading basket author’s backround & other relevant resource interactivity: comments, annotations, rating

Communities of practice Identity – the bedrock of social architecture Profile & Reputation Presence – the sense of life Relationships Contacts & Groups Norms & Rules Activity Sharing - “I share because a join a passion and interest” Conversation & Collaboration No matter how much software we build, people build the relationships, and they build them out of words first! Otherwise participation devolves into viewership

Users are humans! complex! dynamic. Humans are complex! and the web is dynamic. human contactinteractionnot new Many more innovations and patterns of excellence will be defined. Yet human contact and interaction is not new. From “A Pattern Language”

GROUP DISCUSSION aim of exercise: to reflect on the user groups and their needs procedure: 1. a question is posed 2. you spend 1 minute thinking about it on your own 3. you spend 10 minutes discussing about it with your group, taking notes altogether [someone should be the note-taker] 4. then each group takes 2-3 minutes to present their ideas 5. in the form of dotmocracy sheets (at least 1!)

Dotmocracy

Summing up VOA3R platform: the open access philosophy combined with community aspects, explicit modelling of processes and elements in research work, as a tool to enhance search and filtering of scholarly content. a work in progress: a 3-yr project, started Jun 2010 online questionnaire and survey, Oct-Nov 2010www.voa3r.eu

Questions for group discussion *Please include indicative questions according to your user group – Use the indicative questions from VOA3R-UR-prelim – Or present the mind-map and extract selected questions for each group to work on – Or let your groups indicate some questions Ultimately a successful requirements gathering session boils down to asking the right questions, and documenting the results, ideas, concerns, etc. that arise....