Observation Support Concept

1. Observation Support Concept • A System for Research Collaboration Jeff Mitchell http://www.stormbourne.com

2. How Can I Help? • One possible way I can contribute is to provide a workflow solution. This solution would allow a deep level of coordination among researchers and volunteers.

3. System Goals • Facilitate Communication • Increase visibility of lines of research to the public and the observation and research community. • Remove barriers to participating in projects that could benefit from volunteers, or a wider base of professional researchers. • Provide equipment coordination and computational support through interface standardization • Use the power of a “research network” to uncover new insights and relationships among research projects

4. Facilitate Communication • Provide a single point of focus for a project’s status. • Quickly identify relationships between projects so that duplicate efforts can be identified. • Provide very detailed chronological records of events and discoveries. • Allow a principal researcher quickly promote the urgency of a given task or subproject to the projects network.

5. Remove Barriers to Participation • Would allow prospective volunteers to watch and learn before attempting to contribute. • Knowledge transfer to the project’s network becomes a force multiplier for the researcher. • Education and on-boarding materials are continually improved by the network. • The network begins to take on the tasks associated with making new members productive

6. Provide Computational Support • Provide a framework in which “manual” computations can be performed, commonly formatted, aggregated and vetted by the research project’s network participants. • Harness the untapped computational powers of the idle desktop or notebook computers. One method might be Internet scale clustering through message passing interfaces. Another method would be simply grabbing a dataset, operating on a dataset, returning a result set. • Provide project integration points or gateways to existing systems containing data that might of use but otherwise have no public interface. • Achieved partially through simple and standardized application programming interfaces (API) or domain specific languages (DSL).

7. Harness the Power of the Network Graph • This system would have a research project centered focus instead of an individual person focus as in a social networking platform. • Would use graph database technologies to reveal relationships between research that might have gone unnoticed with the widely used Wiki approach. • The content would by massively searchable. Posts even down to the random “musing” on a subject will start to generate a collective insight.

8. How would one start to use a system like this? We’ll start by identifying some likely users of this type of system, the “Actors”, and we’ll list some of their attributes. Then I’ll give two sample use cases.

9. The Actors • Researcher Needing follow-up or confirmation • Researcher needing access to data or insight on what other similar projects exist. • Volunteer Observer • Volunteer Research Assistant

10. A Researcher has a Profile • Areas of specialization • Current projects • primary focus • access to facilities • past publications

11. A Volunteer has a Profile • Areas of interest • Relevant skills • Availability (commitment level) • Past history (recommendations perhaps?) • Relevant equipment

12. Researcher Starts a Project (An example user story) • The project could descend from parents i.e. Asteroid Observation Program >> Orbital Certainty Projects >> (new Project) P-1087-TH Observation. • Project is tagged with interest areas, skills required, equipment required etc. • A list of potential volunteers and researchers materializes to the researcher as well as similar research projects • The researcher can begin building a network around this project.

13. A Volunteer is Notified (Another example user story) • The P-1087-TH Observation project intersects this volunteers profile to some degree. • The volunteer can see the requirements and similar research projects. • Volunteer notifies the researcher of an intent to join the projects network or moves on to the next notification.

14. The Project (The Main Character) • It’s not exactly an actor but it’s the central focus of the system. • It has a subject or series of subjects. • It has participants. • It has ever growing content contributions from simple status posts to detailed calculations and beyond. • It has interfaces to necessary systems and data sources. • It likely descends from a broader project.

15. System Life Cycle • I plan to develop to a minimum level of functionality, then let community voting drive further development. • Web based architecture allows for Continuous deployment/integration. • Portal exists for defect reports and management. • High availability, and highly scalable architecture. • No ads. • To keep the system funded I would seek some revenue through directed integrations, funded research and specialized commercial implementations.

16. Closing Need a few early adopters with projects to help refine the first release. Please contact me for more info if you would like to participate.

17. More Info • About me – http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffmitchell • Contact me – jeffm@stormbourne.com • About my company – http://www.stormbourne.com