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Cyberinfrastructure, Institutions, and Sustainability

Christopher J. Mackie Associate Program Officer The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “Designing Virtual Organizations…” Collaborative Expedition Workshop Arlington, VA. Cyberinfrastructure, Institutions, and Sustainability.

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Cyberinfrastructure, Institutions, and Sustainability

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  1. Christopher J. Mackie Associate Program Officer The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation “Designing Virtual Organizations…” Collaborative Expedition Workshop Arlington, VA Cyberinfrastructure, Institutions, and Sustainability

  2. Largest non-governmental, NFP funder of OSS infrastructure projects in the world, to our knowledge, through the Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT) Applications and middleware; moving toward SOA In the last 6 years, approximately two dozen projects: Mellon and Cyberinfrastructure

  3. Our OSS projects now built by virtual development orgs (VDOs) • 3-12 institutions; most staff formally seconded to VDO • VDO has project mgr, staff: reports to project Board • $6m-40m total capitalization • Kuali, FLUID • “Virtual Departments” for LibArts colleges • Work through consortia (NITLE, ACA) • Virtual Research Orgs • SEASR • Sakai Mellon and Virtual Orgs

  4. The NSF vision is powerful and plausible Only one problem: what if it works…? “Don’t do anything great unless you are prepared to survive the celebration.” – John Madden We should plan now for the transition from term-limited NSF project support to sustainable institutional support Without a transition plan, costs will go up, adoption down; sustainability (on a broad basis) may not be possible NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure vision

  5. Internal IT capacity is declining • Demand is increasing faster than budget • Staff are aging; labor markets are inhospitable • Home-brew enterprise software is growing too expensive to build or maintain • Software development & maintenance capacity is vanishing; vendor dependence is increasing • Application Overburden • $heer number of applications • Incompatible stack$ • Adoption & integration challenge$ • $ilo$ Institutional Trends

  6. Adoption, maintenance costs must be kept to a minimum • Minimize number of stacks • Minimize number of org silos • CI must integrate/interoperate smoothly with existing infrastructure • AuthN/AuthZ/IdM • Workflow, UI • Academic systems (LMS, calendaring, etc.) • Admin systems (ERP, HR, student, research admin) • Important for CI integration today; more so post-funding • We don’t want Sophie’s choice Sustaining CI Thru Campuses

  7. Goal: make CI adoptable and sustainable for the widest possible number and variety of higher education institutions • Four strategies • Bring the right people to the table • Seek common foundations • Embrace openness and standards • Merge infrastructures prospectively Sustainability Goals, Strategies

  8. If you build it, they will not come…. • Economic/technological/pragmatic barriers • Emotional barriers (NIH syndrome, status, competition, ego) • All relevant stakeholders • Key constituencies for transition and sustainability • CIO/IT (in addition to CS) • Provost • Commercial vendors • Diversity is key • So is representativeness • If we build it, we’re already there. Bring the right people

  9. Architecture: SOA? • Offers many potential gains • Track record in for-profit, but not in K-12 or higher ed • Hardly a panacea: mindless implementations (“SOA apps”) can reproduce old problems at new levels of technological complexity • Still, the alternatives are worse…. • Engineering/Methodologies: Agile Development? • Accepted in operational programming; flexible enough for research programming; but any single approach is a tough sell • Components: SOA middleware? • ESB (including VO-friendly AuthN/AuthZ/IdM) • Workflow/”Business” rules • UI Seek common foundations

  10. Software Interfaces: OKI? OAI-ORE? WS-*? • Protect against bad, early choices • Help with chicken-and-egg dependencies in collaborative projects • Pluggability is a big bonus for components like ESB, workflow, business rules, UI • Interoperability: BPEL? • So many workflow engines, so little time…. • Interoperability standards are the only way to manage proliferation • User Interfaces: FLUID? • Institutions need compliance (e.g., accessibility), consistency, branding • Scholars, students need flexibility, creativity, consistency, local control • Widgets save time, effort for all Embrace Openness and Standards

  11. Identify serendipitous alignments of infrastructure (e,g., middleware layers, common research admin features) • Collaborate on refactoring, generalization of infrastructure to serve multiple projects before the money runs out • Retain distinctive services/workflow/UI layers and autonomous project governance • Merge middleware, common services • Freed resources can be applied to the substantive challenges • The goal is to reduce redundancy, not to reduce project autonomy Merge projects prospectively

  12. SEASR (structured/unstructured rich-media data mining & analysis platform/toolset) www.seasr.org • Goal: Create sustainable, virtual org of humanists, comp scientists • IBM/NCSA • Kuali Suite (ERP, Research Admin, Student) www.kuali.org • Sakai (LMS) www.sakaiproject.org • FEDORA: Repository for the scholarly life-cycle www.fedora.info • MESA: Middleware for Enterprise Services Architectures Mellon SOA/CI Projects

  13. Four middleware layers for NFP ESA • ESB (Q4 2007 alpha) • Business Rules Engine (JBOSS) • Workflow (Mellon/NSF Workshop 3-5 Oct 2007) • FLUID UI (Q4 2007 alpha, www.fluidproject.org) • All open-source, product quality • All will use open-standards interfaces • Can swap out pieces as better options emerge • Can mix and match commercial/OSS pieces • Cross-domain “meta-ESA” for all of higher ed MESA for CI (or Agency) Projects

  14. Robust products, not proofs-of-concept • Healthy vendor ecosystem to provide services: big & small vendors • Easy integration with MESA-using institutions • Meta-inter-disciplinarity (helps CI projects collaborate) • Efficiency (cuts redundancy & maintenance costs) • Focus (on the substance, not the infrastructures) • Sustainability • MESA sustains itself via its own OSS community (and you can contribute) • You only need to sustain the truly unique aspects of your CI WHY Use MESA?

  15. Sustainability isn’t rocket science… • But it requires constant, diligent attention, and a reality-based sustainability plan • Sustainability can’t be an afterthought • Crucial decisions for sustainability are made at every stage of a project • A decision made without thought to sustainability is highly likely to be unsustainable • Sustaining any CI project will be hard… • But sustaining go-it-alone CI projects will be harder still Some Free advice

  16. Christopher J. Mackie Associate Program Officer,Program in Research in Information Technology The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation cjm@mellon.org cjmackie06 @ AIM (609) 924-9424 http://rit.mellon.org Contact information

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