PART 1 – The Empirical Picture
5.14 Role of e-infrastructure in virtual research communities
We find two different views on conceptualizing and measuring the relationship between technology and society: one is usually called “technological determinism” receiving often a strong negative connotation among social scientists and scholars of science and technology studies. Technological determinism follows a top-down logic according to which external, largely independent and fixed technologies determine or force change in the social system that can be measured, modelled and predicted (for an extensive critique to technological determinism see for instance: McLoughlin, 1999). In opposition to technologically
deterministic thinking a number of different constructionist theories have been developed which reject at large the expectation that technology is a driver of social change and instead argue for a more balanced analysis. These constructionist approaches partially differ widely but most of them agree that a better conceptualization of the interaction between technology and society is one of a mutual shaping of both: non-generic, configurable technologies are understood, adapted and used in different ways and according to the (dynamic) needs of specific communities (see Edge, 1995, McLoughlin, 1999, for an overview).
At the current point in time, we would categorize most e-Infrastructures still as non-generic (with the exception of research networks) and therefore rather the later type of perspective seems adequate, trying to understand how e-Infrastructures become e-Infrastructures and how they are adapted and appropriated in different research communities. The previous sections provided some evidence along these lines and we would now like to describe, how the informants on the different e-Infrastructure cases – in most cases the people who run and coordinate them and are responsible for providing the services – perceive the impact of their infrastructure in the wider community. Table 1-3 in the annex contains an overview of the
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conducted in spring 2009. If we categorize these achievements into technical, scientific, socio-cultural (which includes political integration), other and none we get the following result as shown in figure 6-1. Most projects listed contributions in one or two areas, only few contributed in three areas and none in all four areas.
Figure 5-4: Main contributions of the cases by type
No contributions: CLARIN and DARIAH see overview of contributions Table 1-3 in the annex.
Scientific contributions were mentioned in 5 out of 18 projects, though we probably can take for granted that the other large infrastructures, DEISA, OSG, and TeraGrid, also contributed to some extent to the advancement of the fields which use them. We would expect that our informants, which were in most cases coordinators and managers of the projects or project parts, are only partially aware of the projects’ contributions to science.
We note that out of 18 projects 15 projects or more than three quarters point to technical achievements in the widest sense as major outcomes. These achievements can be new software, tools, standards, proof of concepts of technical or organizational solutions, access to data, access to computing resources, increased data transmission capacities or the like – the broadness reflects the wide range of cases included in the study. However, a key point is that these contributions do not yet directly reflect scientific advancements from the research communities surrounding the infrastructure. This pronounced position of technical outcomes is probably a consequence of the early phase of e-infrastructure development for which the investigated projects mostly stand, in which technical progress was necessary and a main focus of nearly every project. Some technical progress can be taken for granted in virtually all projects, as out of the three projects not listed here two did not report any contributions at all (CLARIN and DARIAH are still in an early phase). Finally, it is worth pointing to the survey results, where access to resources, organizational (benefits) technical capacities, but also ease of use, funding and training are mentioned as catalysts (but also as barriers).
The socio-cultural (including political) contributions refer in particular to the establishment of new initiatives and organizations for the long-term provision of e-infrastructure services to science and technology, such as National Grid Initiatives, international organizations and the
Page 133 like. Projects like EELA-2 had defined this as a major goal right from the start whereas for others – the Swiss BioGrid is here a case – this turned out to be the best path to reaching sustainability (even the Swiss only belatedly started a national grid infrastructure, after the project finished). Having said this, we would certainly hope for more projects going along these lines in the future as this is seen as a major catalyst by survey respondents.
Socio-cultural contributions or achievements refer to one of the core interests of this study, namely the impact of e-infrastructures on research communities. Notably in more than half of the cases our informants listed this type of impact. Taking a closer look at the communities which benefited, we find that in four cases – DRIVER, EELA-2, EGEE, and TeraGrid, all providers of e-infrastructure services, and the standardization effort OGF – it was mainly communities of e-infrastructure developers, such as supercomputing, Grid computing, or digital library communities, which received a boost from the involvement in the projects. In another set of projects – DEISA, ETSF, and NVO – the effects of community building were felt (according to our informants) more in the user domains. For ETSF and NVO this could be expected, as they are essentially community efforts of physicists, respectively astronomers.
DEISA is somewhat an exception, but the classification is due to the fact that DEISA facilitates access to supercomputers for international projects and thus strengthens community
networks. A third type of projects contributes to better interweaving e-infrastructure communities with user communities: CineGrid links networking, scientific visualization and digital cinema/media experts, D4Science brings Grid and digital library services to
environmental monitoring and fisheries and aquaculture management communities, and last but not least OSG provides computing infrastructure to several fields. We do not wish to rank these socio-cultural contributions and projects in any way. They are all highly valuable results of an emerging e-infrastructure landscape that is still under development. However, the impact on domain-based virtual research communities outside of e-infrastructure
development is probably higher in the second and third group of projects than in the first one.
This stresses again the necessity for e-infrastructure developments to engage with user communities as early and comprehensively as possible.
It is notable that economic or commercial contributions were not mentioned by any of the cases, merely the involvement of partners from industry and private businesses was considered as a success in a few cases (NVO, OGF). Such commercial effects could be for instance spin-offs in the form of private service providers, partnerships with existing service providers, revenues through services to the private non-research sector or the like. For some cases such effects are largely prevented because of the contracts or the statutes of the funders which limit services to non-academic undertakings and purposes (e.g. EGEE, Géant and or CineGrid mentioned this explicitly). For others such commercial effects may exist but still at small levels and not worth mentioning, or the development stage may not yet be advanced enough for generating such effects. Last but not least, we also have to reflect that none of the projects included economic or commercial goals among its core goals (see section 5.2 above).
If we cross-tabulate this typology of contributions with another variable, the international versus national reach of the infrastructure, we obtain a further interesting result: Projects with socio-cultural impact are all multinational, except for three US-American projects. None of the four European national e-infrastructure cases that we investigated (C3-Grid, MediGrid, Swedish National Data Service, Swiss BioGrid) mentioned contributions in community building.
This might be just a coincidence; however, we would rather make a different argument:
scientific communities in European countries reserve national “playgrounds” for themselves and don’t show a lot of interest in opening them up to colleagues from other countries.
Individually very different reasons may explain such behavior, in particular technological and economic competition, but also data protection (and trust in its maintenance) or specific national research interests and paradigms. Research communities are then sealed off to outsiders and an extension or uncontrolled increase of dynamics is of little interest to the
Page 134 insiders.17 International projects and European projects in particular may dissolve these stalemates, whenever they manage to formulate goals of a higher priority and benefit.
Table 5-20: Main contributions of the cases by type and geographical scope of the infrastructure
Scientific Technical Socio-cultural Other None International
See overview of contributions in Table 1-3 in the annex.
In addition, we also distinguished the contributions of the e-infrastructures between mono- and multidisciplinary infrastructures and between infrastructures producing computing
services versus those that produce access to data or other resources (see annex tables 1-4 and 1-5). The differences do not reveal a particular pattern except for one issue: computing infrastructures are more active when it comes to socio-cultural (political) integration (see Annex table 1-5). Clearly this is a side effect of the currently ongoing institutionalization of Grid computing in national initiatives, a phenomenon that can not (yet) be found to the same extent for data infrastructures.
Another aspect covered in the case reports refers to the main challenges that the case informants perceive for reaching their future goals (see table 1-6 in the annex). As we would expect, funding is listed as the most important single main challenge perceived in more than half of the cases. Organizational challenges are also quite common. They refer in particular to issues such as maintaining attractiveness to users in the light of competitive offers (OGF, OSG, and TeraGrid), keeping current users involved or reaching out to new users (CineGrid, CLARIN, D4Science, DEISA, NVO, and OSG) and improving internal management (CineGrid, MediGrid, and SND). Technical challenges address primarily the service quality of interfaces and applications targeted to users (C3-Grid, D4Science, DEISA, OSG), interoperability issues (D4Science, EELA-2) and only in one (immature) case, CLARIN, the development of the core e-infrastructure. Further challenges are legal – in the case of MediGrid where data protection laws place a burden on the sharing of patient data – and relating to the change of scientific practice, as the establishment of “enhanced publications” aimed for by the Driver project.
Thus we see a wide range of challenges, but, as will come as little surprise to those familiar with e-infrastructure development, the sustainability of the funding and use of the
infrastructures are the most frequent ones faced in one way or another by nearly all the cases that we looked at.
17 Because of the sheer size of the country and its science system the US is different in this regard – not that the same arguments don’t apply there, too, but community-building and extension may still go on at national level.
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