Grammars of Collaboration:
Designing for e-Science
Mark Hartswood, Roger Slack, Kate Ho, Marina Jirotka, Rob
Proctor, Jenny Ure, Alex Voss
Vision and Reality
• One role of visions is to provide a future
orientation for research and practice; they can
sometimes, however, be blind to the sorts of
practical problems on the ground which impact
on its realisation
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Quantitative and qualitative changes
Scientific work and scientific communication
Situated and virtual
Local and Global
Social and Technical
• Everyday interactions on the ground that shape and are
shaped by these new ‘virtual organisations’ and in many
cases hinder the realisation of the vision
• Examples from a number of Grid based projects
Examples from eHealth and others
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eDiamond
GS: Scottish Family Health Study
MRC NeuroGrid
NTRAC: National Translational Cancer Research
Network (Edinburgh Centre)
So-called ‘joined-up’ systems envisage services
being delivered through virtual organisational
structures (VOs)
Flexible VOs formed around networks within,
and across, multiple service units and
administrative domains
The Vision of the Virtual Organisation
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Across disciplines
Across organisations
Across CoPs
Across complex
distributed human and
technical networks
Translational Medicine
Patient Care
Clinical Trials
Drug Development
Bench Science
Epidemiology
‘From bench science to clinical practice’
Edinburgh NTRAC Centre
Integrating clinical, molecular and trial data
A
Cumulative Survival
1.0
.9
.8
.7
Carriers
.6
.5
.4
Non-carriers
.3
.2
.1
0.0
0
1
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Survival time post diagnosis (years)
8
Vision of Benefits
• Shorter start-up periods for studies, cost-effectiveness and
earlier realisation of outcomes
• Feeding the virtuous circle of translational research
• Getting benefits of e-Science projects realised in practice
• Technologies that are ‘in working order’:
– in line with NHS infrastructure
– in line with research infrastructure
– usable in clinical and research contexts
• Platform for eHealth innovations
• Direct benefits for patients through trials and feedback of
research results
Gap between vision and reality
Relating ‘bleeding edge’ research to established,
routine, accepted practice requires (among other
things)negotiation of obligations, expectations,
reciprocities associated with sharing of data and
resources in local communities
Data Integration : the NeuroGrid Vision
-the social life of information
• Integration of data
collected for very
different purposes
• Reliability of data
collected across multiple
sites – or even across
the same research lab
• Myth of shared protocols!
Subject groups, Trial purposes, Trial data
Longitudinal studies over several years
Different scanners, protocols, clinical/cognitive tests
Different data formats
Varying methods and regions of interest
Algorithms such as Freesurfer, SPM, auto-Gyrification Index
Varying clinical diagnoses and demographics
Differences across CoPs
Disciplines -Psychiatry, Psychology, Computer Science,
Neuroscience, Physics, Radiology, Nursing
Aims
-funding Strategies – competition vs collaboration
-Criteria – cost, time, usability
Implications for Grid-based VOs
‘One might say that Grid technologies represent
a shift from data and resource sharing in
collaboration as a craft or cottage industry, to
something that can be routinely engineered and
expected to behave in a well mannered way’
Implications for making collaborative work visible
in virtual organisations
Local Grammars
The articulation of local community structures is an intrinsic part of the
social process in natural communities
• Shared understanding
• Shared aims and criteria
• Shared and visible mechanisms for carrying out,
Providing additional technical infrastructure can make performance
worse if the social, technical and socio-technical articulation of the
complex is not in alignment.
Increasingly, system design reflects the need to generate a similar
process for larger ensembles that do not have the shared spaces in
which to do so.
Supporting project collaboration
• Developing embryonic
community infrastructure as
basis for co-creating a sociotechnical one.
• Shared spaces
• Shared frames of reference
Nokia Arrabianranta
Socio-technical & Socio-political Grammars
• Vision of Grid science dependent on socio-political,
legal and contractual infrastructures not yet in place
(NH Records)
• Resulting tensions affect realisation of the translational
science vision e.g. tensions between ethical consent
and research access to patient records in eHealth
e-Science & scientific process
• Gives rise to new ‘virtual organisations’
(Foster & Kesselman, 2004)
• More heterogeneous
• More interdisciplinary
• More potential for alignment and misalignment (examples)
• Opportunities for rethinking the nature of scientific work
• Recurring problem: solution scenarios
Aligning the whole and the parts:
visualisation
Interest in the different ways in which VOs can
shape or be shaped by the grammar of
collaborative processes in local contexts
• Role of mapping these (often invisible) local
processes to inform design
• Role of designers in making the processes in the
VO more visible for the users
Visualising systems: allowing users to ‘see’
the implications of action in the system
Visualising data architecture for users
Building systems around
the cognitive process.
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WebSOMs
Shneiderman
Bush
Pask
Hitchens
Visualising local processes for designers
eDiamond
Involved ethnographic
studies of collaborative
process ‘in the wild’ with
implications for a virtual
infrastructure to extend
that
The collaborative process in the wild
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Computer-aided Detection (CAD)
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Use image analysis software to detect potential abnormalities
Draw these to the reader’s attention using a ‘prompt’
Designed to prevent readers from overlooking a possible abnormality
Has a number of potential roles:
• Making screening more sensitive
• Supporting single reading
• Supporting less experienced reader
Decision-aids in mammography
• The idea is for prompting systems to act as attention cues
• Look at the images and reach own conclusion before looking at the
prompts
• However, we saw evidence of prompts being used as decision-aids:
“I’m not really that worried about it. [At all?]. But as CAD’s marked it
now, it’s a case of – do I really take more notice of it? … I’ll mark it.
I’m going to mark it down - as possibly being something.” (transcript
from video)
VOs heighten the need for synergy &
alignment to common ends
•One size fits all
•Global and Local Requirements
•Federated Local Requirements
Local and Global collaboration
• Software designed to
standardise safety
compliance procedures
globally, was actually
increasing risk in some local
operating sites
Aligning heterogeneous and
distributed communities of interest
Collaboration can add value
Or cost and risk
• Challenger
• Iraq procurement
system was deemed a
success - technically
Tension
Interviewer:
You’ve mentioned the
problem of requirements
‘creep’ late in the design.
Can you think of anything
that might have helped
avoid this?
Technical Manager:
‘A cluster bomb perhaps?’
Grammars of consent, liability,reward
• Grid protocols for acceptable use of resource
• Ethical consent for use, reuse, repurposing
• New or varied conversations became possible
for which these rights, permissions and potential
benefits or penalties have not been negotiated
and for which a process is required
• The e-Science bundle of new paradigms, technologies
and concepts has challenged the accepted order that is
seen to govern how collaborations conventionally unfold
in less distributed contexts.
• Making the collaborative process more visible to
designers and users is part of realising the Grid vision
Barriers to Grid Vision
Collaboration in designing systems was about criteria
and reward within particular communities as much as
knowledge transfer
Many of the problems were recurrent scenarios found in
other Grid projects, and in other distributed sociotechnical systems
Visions of eScience: the ‘third way’
• Buetow (2005) suggests that the cyber-infrastructure
provided by and for e-science can reconfigure our
perceptions of what doing scientific research in
distributed settings might be
• Laurillard
• VLE ebusiness experience
Users face problems understanding
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Provenance of data
Reliability of data
Security of data
Implications of action – who sees the data etc
Dependability of service
Shape of the organisation
Transformational Technologies?
• Emergent work practices and requirements may only
become evident as users attempt to apply the system to
their work
• Requirements capture and design are currently
separated off from the deployment of the system.
• Through ‘learning by doing’ and ‘learning by interacting’,
users are able to experiment, share and appropriate the
innovations of others, mobilising their collective
resources to evolve systems, to continue ‘design-in-use
Nokia and Arrabianranta
Visualising systems: allowing users to ‘see’
the implications of action in the system
Future Work
• Policies that govern the VO are codified and
embedded in the collaborating systems, and
interactions between the organisation are audited.
• This provides an opportunity to visualise the VO to
end users
• aim is to explore how existing e-Science
infrastructures could be used to meet these
usability requirements
Recurring Collaborative Strategies
in other Systems
• Map existing process
• co create a new one
Building Technology Around
Social Processes
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Local Scenario
SSM
CATWOE
Amazon
Limewire
eBAY - brokerage
Using the Architecture of Social
Networks
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Brokerage
Closure
Burt
Sense-making
Social Capital
Pre-requisites for Collaboration
• Shared spaces
• Shared frames & terms
of reference
• Shared aims
• The ‘file’ ‘programme’
analogy
Open
Social
Te
Technical
Closed