PRESENTER’S NAME & CONTACT DETAILS

1. VOA3RVirtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository: sharing scientific and scholarly research related to agriculture, food, and environment User Requirementsfor the VOA3R platform PRESENTER’S NAME & CONTACT DETAILS

2. OBJECTIVES • the VOA3R platform • who are the stakeholders • what are their requirements • identify requirements • validate requirements • document and organise requirements

3. VOA3R (co-)funding • ICT Policy Support Programme aims at • stimulating innovation • and competitiveness through • wider uptake and • best use of ICT by • citizens, • governments and • businesses.

4. The VOA3R platform • Key objectives: • Improve the spread of European agriculture and aquaculture research results • by using an innovative approach to sharing open access research products • a federation approach that integrates existing open access repositories and scholarly publication management systems • Main innovation • Social portal • Community-focused integrated service

5. Key features • open access, research and analysis • highly specific literature analysis • formulate searches in personal fields • facilitate open access publishing • preprint publishing, • informal feedback, • different forms of peer evaluation and post-archival assessment • communities of practice • ratings, public reviews, suggestions • experts online identity and reputation

6. Social search • Social search help you discover relevant content from your social circle, a set of peers and contacts. • content from your peers and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers

7. Object-Centered sociality

9. Access, publish, organise, socialise!

10. An old story... • As early as the 1970s! • “Surveying the national scientific and technological potential, including the collection and processing of data management, of the R&D system”. (UNESCO, Paris 1970, 251 p.) • “Study report on the feasibility of a world science information system” (UNISIST, Paris, 1971, 161 p. - Synopses) • 1987, 1st Conference on European Research Databases

11. THE VOA3R STAKEHOLDERS’ USER REQUIREMENTS

12. Requirements analysis main activities • Eliciting requirements: • communicating with stakeholders and users • determine what their requirements are. • Analyzing requirements: • unclear, incomplete, contradictory requirements • resolve these issues. • Recording requirements: • such as natural-language documents, • use cases, user stories, process specifications, etc. • Validating & Prioritising requirements

13. Stakeholder participation • Requirements analysis is a communication problem • Participation is important! • Great level of improvement • Conversation & Confirmation … BUT … • Having a problem does not uniquely qualify to solve it: ”It hurts when I go like this...” • We need to stop asking users • Rather ask them to participate • in effect... work together!

14. Who are the stakeholders? • Researchers • Academics • Practitioners • Students • Librarians, Editors • Decision makers • the Industry • and other organisations • but also: the anonymous web surfer • and certainly: Other systems and services! • Producers • Consumers • External systems

15. TASKS • Identify stakeholders • Analyse the use of current systems by different user categories • Use partners’ experience with existing systems and last, but not least... • ask the Stakeholders

16. The producers’ needs • Publishing research online • pre- and post-publish support • peer-reviewing → model the scholarly process • Make research items more accessible • Support post-publication assessment • Foster post-publication dialogue • Electronic CV

18. The consumers’ needs • Information retrieval • open access • open limits • heterogeneous content • locate, search / semantic search • browse • Information processing • layers of links • online reading: annotations, bookmarks, reading basket • author’s backround & other relevant resource • interactivity: comments, annotations, rating

19. Communities of practice • Identity – the bedrock of social architecture • Profile & Reputation • Presence – the sense of life • Relationships • Contacts & Groups • Norms & Rules • Activity • Sharing - “I share because a join a passion and interest” • Conversation & Collaboration • No matter how much software we build, people build the relationships, and they build them out of words first! • Otherwise participation devolves into viewership

20. Users are humans! • Humans are complex!and the web is dynamic. • Many more innovations and patterns of excellence will be defined. Yet human contact and interaction is not new. • From “A Pattern Language”

21. GROUP DISCUSSION • aim of exercise: to reflect on the user groups and their needs • procedure: • a question is posed • you spend 1 minute thinking about it on your own • you spend 10 minutes discussing about it with your group, taking notes altogether [someone should be the note-taker] • then each group takes 2-3 minutes to present their ideas • in the form of dotmocracy sheets (at least 1!)

22. Dotmocracy

23. Summing up • VOA3R platform: the open access philosophy combined with • community aspects, • explicit modelling of processes and elements in research work, as a tool to enhance search and filtering of scholarly content. • a work in progress: • a 3-yr project, started Jun 2010 • online questionnaire and survey, Oct-Nov 2010 www.voa3r.eu

24. Questions for group discussion * Please include indicative questions according to your user group • Use the indicative questions from VOA3R-UR-prelim • Or present the mind-map and extract selected questions for each group to work on • Or let your groups indicate some questions Ultimately a successful requirements gathering session boils down to asking the right questions, and documenting the results, ideas, concerns, etc. that arise ....