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Nurturing a community based sustainability model Support and outreach structures in Scratchpads

Nurturing a community based sustainability model Support and outreach structures in Scratchpads. Livermore L. & Koureas D. Biodiversity Informatics Group | Department of Life Sciences Natural History Museum, London. 680 Biodiversity Information projects. Development phase. Project ends.

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Nurturing a community based sustainability model Support and outreach structures in Scratchpads

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  1. Nurturing a community based sustainability model Support and outreach structures in Scratchpads Livermore L. & Koureas D. Biodiversity Informatics Group | Department of Life Sciences Natural History Museum, London

  2. 680 Biodiversity Information projects Development phase • Project ends • Funding application Maintenance No further funding or gap in funding for development ? • Project starts The ephemeral lifecycle of a project

  3. “…telephones do not crash; power supplies do not fluctuate; and clocks do not halt (in general). Similarly, a computational tool (…) must be reliable across time, itmust be maintained.”1 1RibesD., Finholt T.A. 2007 Proceedings of the third International Conference on e-Social Science

  4. Transition from Project Infrastructure Implementation Communal / agreed Persistent Essential Robust & reliable • Discovery • Individualistic • Ephemeral • Optional • Risk taking adapted from Patterson D. 2013, Tempe, Arizona

  5. Post-project sustainability is always a major concern but… Maturation indices? Sustainability criteria? Funding for maintenance? so… How can we secure the future of our projects?

  6. Shift in the way we think of e-infrastructuresand information resources Dynamic/open process Stable/rigid system Outsourcetothe end user community We need to set up the environment that will enable the community contribution “An infrastructure must be taken as a processinstead of a system.” Koerten, H. & van den Besselaar P. (2013) Sustainable Taxonomic Infrastructures: System or Process?

  7. ScratchpadsVirtual Research Environments 544 Scratchpads 91,631taxa 6,644 active users

  8. Data collection & generation a seamless workflow Data publishing Data curation Data analysis

  9. Community based sustainability model • Infrastructure maintenance • Technical maintenance • User support • Open source & modular • Crowdsourcingsupport activities • Maximising support efficiency Two basic pillars

  10. Crowdsourcing the support activities Ambassadors programme Share enthusiasm and vision Usage experience Geographically distributed and cross-domain 20ambassadors in 16countries

  11. Crowdsourcing the support activities Ambassadors programme Give talks about Scratchpads Arrange for or give training courses Act as focal point of local Scratchpad expertise Promote the use of Scratchpads in their community Provide support to new local Scratchpad user communities Provide support to local users in languages other than English 1 2 3 4 5 6

  12. Crowdsourcing the support activities Ambassadors programme plannedand organised training courses by Ambassadors Ukraine Malaysia Cameroon

  13. Crowdsourcing the support activities Training On-site Raise awareness | Promote platform 16 courses in 2013 Train users Train trainers

  14. Crowdsourcing the support activities Training On-line 3 online courses in 2013 Participants from Australia, Africa, Europe Global reach Low cost

  15. Maximising support efficiency Project management – Issues queue > 1,200 issues / year Redmine open sourced project management system Bug reports Feature requests Support queries 61% processed within a day1 81% processed within a week1 1 Brake I. et al. 2011. Zookeys 150 doi:10.3897/zookeys.150.2191

  16. Maximising support efficiency Project management – Issues queue Straight-forward workflow Co-learning environment Development Team Issue Team member user Support Team

  17. Maximising support efficiency Documentation Wiki based documentation site > 115,000 views

  18. Maximising support efficiency Documentation Consistent theming | Constant update

  19. Maximising support efficiency 1Embracing a commons philosophy Adopt CC licences for all support content 2 Improve cost/benefit ratio Adopt open-source support software 3 Keep open communication channels Sustain intuitive communication tools 4 Study your end-user base Perform sociological studies

  20. Conclusions but… Could a community support model alone be the solution? Could any our projects follow a Wikipedia paradigm? Probably not yet Hybrid models will need to be applied Anchor to core funding | Maintain through development | distributed models

  21. “In order to support research, development and maintenance we must either change reward structures or incorporate new kinds of participants in Cyber-infrastructure efforts.” RibesD., Finholt T.A. 2007 Proceedings of the third International Conference on e-Social Science

  22. Thank you

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