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e-ResearchCommunity.org

Realising and Supporting Collaboration in e-Research

Workshop at ECSCW'07 in Limerick, Ireland, 24th September 2007

Organisers: Alex Voss1, Rob Procter1, Meik Poschen1, Tom Rodden2, Gary Olson3, Roger Slack4, Mark Hartswood5 Marina Jirotka6, Annamaria Carusi6, Steffen Budweg7

1National Centre for e-Social Science, University of Manchester, UK
2School of Computer Science and IT, University of Nottingham, UK
3School of Information, University of Michigan, US
4School of Social Sciences, University of Wales, Bangor, UK
5School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
6Oxford e-Research Centre, Oxford University, UK
7Fraunhofer FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany

Table of Contents

Introduction

Over the last six years, the UK e-Science Programme, the Cyberinfrastructure programme in the US and similar intiatives in other countries have been key in establishing the vision of e-Research and securing significant funding for work aiming to establish sophisticated, ubiquitous e-infrastructures for research. More recently, e-Research has started to move from the development of basic technologies (like the Grid) and early demonstrators to more routine practice and the range of research disciplines taking up e-Research approaches has widened and now includes social science and arts & humanities research. It is at this point, where the focus shifts to the accomplishment of e-Research as a routine undertaking, that issues to do with collaboration in e-Research come to the fore. At the same time, serious questions are being asked about the wider uptake and sustainability of e-Research.

Many of these issues, e.g., supporting remote or distributed collaboration, understanding the social dimensions of collaboration and technology use, building collaborative applications and environments have been key research areas for the CSCW community over the years, placing it in a unique position to contribute methodological, conceptual and practical insights in support of the e-Research endeavour. The workshop will contribute to our evolving understanding of how e- Research endeavours get realised. It follows on from a workshop on Realising e- Research Endeavours, which took place at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh in March 2007, a workshop on Virtual Research Environments and Collaborative Work Environments that took place at the e-Science Institute in May and a forthcoming workshop on VREs at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Nottingham in September 2007.

Outcomes


(click to enlarge)

Position Statements and Talks

The following position statements were submitted to this workshop (by author name). For some there are also slides for the presentations given in either Powerpoint or PDF format:

Community Workspace

You can find more information about the workshop and further discussions after the event in the workshop workspace at AMI@Work.

More general information about the role of CSCW (and related research traditions in e-Research) can be found in the e-Research@Work workspace.

Agenda
09:00 - 09:30 Welcome and Introduction
09:30 - 10:30 Presentations: Ardaiz et al.; Bjorn; Fraser; Jiang
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee
11:00 - 12:00 Presentations: Kellogg, Thomas, Daw, Schwartz
12:00 - 13:30 Lunchbreak
13:30 - 14:15 Presentations: Yang & Allan, Carmichael, Kuutti
14:15 - 15:30 Discussions: identifying common themes
15:30 - 16:00 Coffee
16:00 - 17:00 Discussion: CSCW and e-Science, Future Plans and Wrap-Up

Details of Workshop Call

This full-day workshop will be of interest to people who would like to see the CSCW community play a stronger role in e-Research programmes. It will also be of interest to people building virtual research environments (aka. cyberenvironments or science gateways) or are studying e-Research activities from a CSCW perspective.

In order to allow for it to be very discussion-focused, we would like to limit the number of attendees to 10-15 (in addition to the organisers).

Details of the workshop can be found at http://www.e-researchcommunity.org/news/ecscw07/index.html and in the workshop proposal.

We expect the outcome of the workshop to be a concrete plan for a better utilisation of the lessons of CSCW research in e-Research Endeavours. This may involve plans for training events such as Summer Schools or developing ways in which CSCW knowledge can be brought to bear in e-Research projects. The workshop organisers have a track record of studying collaboration in e-Research and, through their various affiliations, can guarantee that the workshop outcomes are widely disseminated and taken seriously by the e-Research community.

We would like to ask participants to submit 2-page position statements by the 27th of July 2007 by sending a PDF or Word file to alex.voss@ncess.ac.uk. Acceptance notifications will be sent by the 1st August.