Accelerating the deployment and
uptake of open source tools by the eResearch community: what are the
priorities for products, services and
support?
Present: Steve Brewer (scribe), Steve Lee (facilitator),
Andrew Price, Damian Brasher, Philip Wieder, Stuart
Aitken, Gagarine (Greg) Yaikhom
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Outline
OMII-UK has had recent success with the ENGAGE Initiative in
discovering what a broad cross section of practitioners
in a whole spectrum of research communities are doing.
This has enabled the ENGAGE project to target
resources at a small number of initiatives to take these
examples of best practice to a larger user-base. In
addition much work has gone into improving the OMII-UK
Web site over recent years to act as a hub for news,
information, software and other resources.
The aim of this break-out session is to attempt to identify the
priorities for next steps in the OMII-UK community
engagement roadmap.
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web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
What do participants want from this session?
• Taking s/w to a more user-friendly environment and how to
improve/future-proof s/w. Taking a step back to review whole project
• Users just want to click a button; certificates can be a significant
barrier; Users are not interested in Computer Science. NGS is big
system – needs simple user interface.
• How to accelerate process of getting new OSS out; tracking projects
• How do we raise awareness of existing apps; costs for developers
• Code sustainability needs help – more than OS, eg, open development;
people need guidance on how to evaluate the sustainability of
applications. Looking for ways of integrating this with development (and
to hear about what else is going )
• German D-Grid is using UNICORE, Globus and gLite. OS tools and
libraries need to work with any of these. Wants to know size of
community ; who is doing what. But also future perspectives – how to
capture the memory. Risk awareness, risk management
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web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Key issues:
• How do we track the progress and success of
projects?
• Projects v. products? Apps, support,
• In early stages: projects are transparent then evolve
into products which are typically less transparent.
However transparency at a later stage is good it can
demonstrate openness; at application level users
don’t want or need too much information
• Products should have sustainability, critical mass
(how do we build this?)
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web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Conclusions
• How do users, funders and others evaluate the risks
associated with the uptake and deployment of s/w?
• How do projects mitigate against risks?
o
Priorities to asses and monitor risks:
• Metrics – formal measures but not necessarily comparable (timebased, domain-based, application-based)
• Discovery – what is the big picture for an application (marketing v.
investigation and analysis) New UNICORE Web site led to more use
• Control – what degree of control for fixing faults etc.
• Sustainability – risk is key
• How open is the development process?
5
web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk
Future work
• Nothing specific identified although group feel that
deployment and uptake acceleration is important
• Wait and see how this relates to other groups
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web: www.omii.ac.uk
email: info@omii.ac.uk