Virtual organizations: Team Science, Team Shakespeare

1. Virtual organizations: Team Science, Team Shakespeare

2. Virtual Organizations • An increasing artifact of the landscape of scientific research, largely from the cost complex nature of the new instruments and growing data sets • Always inter-institutional, frequently international • Having a “mission” in teaching and a need for administration • Tend to cluster around unique global scale facilities and instruments • Heavily reflected in agency solicitations and peer review processes • Being seen now in the arts and humanities

3. Virtual Organizations as seen by NSF OCI • A virtual organization is a group of individuals whose members and resources may be dispersed geographically, yet who function as a coherent unit through the use of cyberinfrastructure. Virtual organizations may be known by a range of names, including: collaboratories, distributed work groups, virtual teams, online communities, and science gateways.   • Distributed across space, with participants spanning localities and institutions; • Distributed across time, allowing synchronous as well asynchronous interactions; • Dynamic structures and processes, at every stage of the organizational lifecycle; • Computationally enabled, via collaboration support systems including e-mail, teleconferencing, telepresence, awareness, social computing, and group information management tools; and, • Computationally enhanced, with simulations, databases, instrumentation, analytic tools and services which facilitate interaction with human affiliates that are integral to the functioning of the organization.

4. Virtual Organization Characteristics • Distributed across space • Distributed across time • Dynamic management structures • Collaboratively enabled • Computationally enhanced

5. Building Effective Virtual Organizations • A workshop run by NSF in January 2008 to give many newly minted VO’s the wisdom of the ages • Cross directorate with OCI catalytic • A few very insightful talks • Was intended to cover the complex social and economic issues as well as some common technical issues, but veered towards collaboration chaos… • http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/events/VirtOrg2008/

6. Virtual Organization Drivers (VOSS) • A growing shift away from traditions of individual based science toward more collaborative models. • The intellectual challenges and institutional conditions of 21st century science and engineering necessitate  collaboration. In many fields, scholars are confronted with challenges of a scale and complexity that defy the boundaries of traditional fields as well as the limits of individual capacity. • Many scientists and engineers find themselves today working in collaborations, many of which cross disciplinary, institutional, and geographic borders via the support of cyberinfrastructure. • http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08550/nsf08550.htm

7. VOSS interests • Units and frameworks of analysis—both social and technical      • Organizational life cycles • Production and innovation: What technological, social, and legal arrangements support intellectual production and innovation in virtual organizations?   • Organizational structure, scope, and scaling   • Individual and collective motivation • Management, Governance, and Leadership • Measurement and assessment • Comparative performance: Under what conditions do virtual organizations outperform co-located organizations? What tasks or processes can be done or done better by virtual organizations that cannot be done or done as well in co-located organizations, and vice versa? What are the advantages and disadvantages of technological-mediation? Under what conditions (and how) might virtual organizations be instrumented to advance our understanding of certain phenomena better than co-located organizations?

8. NSF Datanet • Develop the new methods, management structures and technologies to manage the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and data streams • New types of organizations envisioned in this solicitation will integrate library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise. • provide reliable digital preservation, access, integration, and analysis capabilities for science and/or engineering data over a decades-long timeline; • continuously anticipate and adapt to changes in technologies and in user needs • engage at the frontiers of computer and information science and cyberinfrastructure • serve as component elements of an interoperable data preservation and access network. • http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503141&org=OCI

9. Comanage • A collaboration management platform, supported in part by a NSF OCI grant, being developed by the Internet2 community, with Stanford as a lead institution • Well-behaved applications externalize their identity management dimensions to an general identity/group/privilege/etc repository (LDAP, MySQL, etc.) • Users manage IdM in a collaboration-centric way, not in a tool-centric way • Uses Shibboleth, Grouper, and Signet • Open source, open protocol

10. Domesticated applications • Applications that externalize their identity management dimensions • Domestication typically goes in stages – first identity, then group and privilege management, then provisioning • Domestication relative to the external access protocols (SAML, LDAP, MySQL, web services, etc.) • Applications done or being targeted • Sympa, Confluence, Asterisk (open-source IP audioconferencing), Dim-Dim (open-source web meeting), Bedeworks (federated open-source calendar), Subversion, JIRA, Al fresco • Finally domain science resources – Instrument, Grids

11. Domain ScienceInstrument Domain ScienceGrid C o Laboratory X Collaboration Management Platform (CMP)and the Attribute Ecosystem File Sharing Calendar Email List Manager Phone/VideoConference FederatedWiki CollaborationTools/ Resources ApplicationAttributes manage CollaborationManagementPlatform Authorization –Group Info Authorization –Privilege Info Authentication PeoplePicker OtherFunctions Attribute/Resource Info Data Store AttributeEcosystemFlows Home Org & Id Providers/Sources ofAuthority Sources of Authority University A University B

12. Two specimen VO’s • LIGO-GEO-VIRGO (www.ligo.org) • Ocean Observing Initiative (http://www.joiscience.org/ocean_observing) • Interests include federated identity, COmanage, and domain science use • Both have international characteristics

13. Lessons Learned • Collaborate externally; compete internally • Time zones are hell • Big turf issue of the local VO sysadmin • Many of the instruments are black-boxes • Physical access controls matter • Scientific accomplishments and egos