e-Uptake: widening uptake of e-Infrastructure Services

1. e-Uptake: widening uptake ofe-Infrastructure Services Marzieh Asgari-Targhi, Alex Voss, Rob Procter et al. ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science

2. 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

3. JISC Community Engagement

4. 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.

5. Part 1: Literature Review and Fieldwork

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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?

9. 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?

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. Training Requirements • Existing training requirements data (AHM, EGEE conferences, etc. – note bias in sample…)

15. 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

16. Part 2: Coding, Typology, Repository of Findings

17. e-Research Tools • Analytical approach being developed and CAQDAS tools (Atlas.ti, NVivo, etc.) considered • Interested in: • Non-proprietary file formats • Support for collaborative work • Integration of qualitative, quantitative and meta-data • Dynamic online presentation in a number of different forms for different stakeholders • Complex queries • Semi-automatic markup, meta-data generation and anonymisation

18. 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

19. e-Research Tools Under review... ...comments very welcome

20. 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…]

21. 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…

22. Part 3: Fostering e-Infrastructures

23. Embedding e-Infrastructures • As e-Infrastructure matures technically, the need to address issues of uptake and embedding in working practices becomes critical.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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

27. 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.

28. Part 4: From User-Designer Relations to Community Engagement

29. Models of Innovation • Linear: diffusion from laboratory into society – ‘build it and they will come’ • Feedback and innovation in use • Socio-technical systems • Importance of local knowledge and practices • Users as stakeholders and experts • Designers as moderators/facilitators as well as technical experts • Configurations

30. User-Designer Relations • Need familiarity with the working practices and concerns of researchers • Researchers need to understand what is possible, what is feasible and what is not, what the tradeoff between different options are • Involves 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)‏

31. Issues‏ • Traditional user engagement works: • in small groups • in relatively homogeneous groups • with (practically) aligned interests • in the design of well-described systems • serving well-defined purposes

32. Issues (II)‏ • e-Infrastructures for research challenge this: • loosely coupled groups of people • with only partially and temporarily aligned interests • multidisciplinarity and scale of collaboration • problem of identifying possible adopters • and engaging them • representativeness • generic vs. specific functionality & support • configurations, not systems

33. …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’.

34. Paths to Wider Uptake Grand ChallengesCapacity Computing / Grid Exceptional work Bespoke functionality Web 2.0 Social Grid Everyday work Common tools

35. Paths to Wider Uptake Grand ChallengesCapacity Computing / Grid Exceptional work Bespoke functionality Embedded e-Research Corealisation Routine innovation Functionality Mashup* Web 2.0 Social Grid Everyday work Common tools *Charles Severance

36. Intervention • Closing the gaps between stages of engagement: • cf. EGEE Virtuous Cycle • Also OSS-Watch model

37. 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?

38. Tracking Developments

39. 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.

40. 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

41. 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

42. Programme – Project Relations (II) • For example: • Community engagement projects have common framework of understanding • Common consent process enabling data sharing • Coordinated approach to identifying candididate respondents, doing interviews, managing data and analysis • Common dissemination activities