Fostering e-Infrastructure:
from user-designer relations to community
engagement
Alex Voss
ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science
www.ncess.ac.uk
Background
 eSI Theme on Adoption and Sustainability
 JISC Community Engagement Strand
 e-Uptake
 eIUS
 ENGAGE
 e-Infrastructure in Arts & Humanities and Social
Sciences
 kick-off meeting in Manchester
 Grid-enabling datasets meeting in Edinburgh
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Agenda
13:00 - 13:45
13:45 - 14:15
14:15 - 15:00
15:00 - 15:30
15:30 - 16:00
16:00 - 16:45
16:45 - 17:00
19:30 -
Welcome, Introduction & Review of Agenda (Alex Voss)
Motivating talk (Alex Voss)
Discussion
Coffee Break
NGS Community Engagement Activities (Gillian Sinclair)
Dicussion
Wrap up of the day (Tobias Blanke)
Dinner at the Tempus Bar at the George Hotel
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Motivation
 Who is the community anyway?
 Who do we want to engage?
 How do we find them?
 What do we want from them?
 How should we engage them?
 What is it we want to do once we have their
interest?
 Why should they be interested?
 What would motivate people to invest their time and
effort?
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Motivation (II)
 Traditional user engagement works:
 in small groups
 in homogeneous groups
 with (practically) aligned interests
 in the design of well-describes systems
 serving well-defined purposes
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Motivation (III)
 e-Infrastructures for research challenge this:
 loosely coupled groups of people
 with only partially and temporarily aligned interests
 multidisciplinarity and scale of collaboration
 perhaps not so pronounced in A&H and SocSci?
 problem of identifying possible adopters
 and engaging them
 representativeness
 generic vs. specific functionality & support
 configurations, not systems
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Who? Identifying the Community
 How do we find suitable candidates for engagement?
 Compiling long lists is relatively easy:
 people we already know
 lists of workshop attendees
 authors of academic papers
 registers of service users
 databases of funded projects
 web mining
 snowballing
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Identifying Respondents
 Filtering this down to appropriate shortlists is harder,
much harder
 e-Uptake alone had long-lists of thousands of names
 Together, the JISC CE projects so far created
shortlists of 394 candidate respondents – people
presumed to be active users of one service or another
 Different interests mean different selection criteria
 Different communities and modes of engagement
 Different experiences with response rates
 Representatives
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
What?
 What do we do once we have peoples'
attention?
 Models of Innovation
 Paths to Wider Uptake
 User Designer Relations
 Community Engagement
 Engagement Cycle
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Models of Innovation
 “build it and they will come” is a thing of the
past, right? ...right?
 but what other ways of thinking have we
replaced this attitude with?
 Just a question of 'better informing' design?
 Just a question of better advertising?
 Do we know 'what' to build in the first place so
we can focus on the 'how'?
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Learning from the (Recent) Past
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Paths to Wider Uptake
Grand Challenges
Capacity Computing / Grid
Exceptional work
Bespoke functionality
Web 2.0
Social Grid
Everyday work
Common tools
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Paths to Wider Uptake
Grand Challenges
Capacity Computing / Grid
Exceptional work
Bespoke functionality
Embedded e-Research
Corealisation
Routine innovation
Functionality Mashup*
Web 2.0
Social Grid
Everyday work
Common tools
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008*Charles
Severance
User-Designer Relations
Designers of e-Research systems need to be familiar 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
This 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, workplace studies)
 Shared practice (co-location, embedding, corealisation)
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Community Engagement
 Include capacity for effective user-designer
relations
 Be familiar with the grammar of what it is larger
groups are doing and how their needs might
overlap
 Building visions, changing collective behaviour
and the structures of academic communities
 Deliver useful “jam today, more jam tomorrow” both in terms of development time and in terms
of paths to uptake
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
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?
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Engagement Cycle
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008
Why? ... should people be
interested?
 What is it that we can actually promise people?
 Concrete help with the problems they may still face
 Better services more suitable to their needs
 etc. - you help me...
Fostering e-Infrastructure, Edinburgh, 8th-9th May 2008