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