Designing Institutional Infrastructure for E-Science

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more dependent upon access to, and sharing of digital research data. Thus, the U.S. NSF Directorate committed in 2005 to a major research funding initiative, “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery”. These investments are aimed at enhancement of computer and network technologies, and the training of researchers. Animated by much the same view, the UK e-Science Core Programme has preceded the NSF effort in funding development of an array of open standard middleware platforms, intended to support Grid enabled science and engineering research. This proceeds from the sceptical view that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve the outcomes envisaged. Success in realizing the potential of e-Science—through the collaborative activities supported by the "cyberinfrastructure," if it is to be achieved, will be the result of a nexus of interrelated social, legal, and technical transformations.e-science, cyberinfrastructure, information sharing, research

TOWARDS INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES FOR E-SCIENCE: The Scope of the Challenge

The three-fold purpose of this Report to the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Research Councils (UK) is to: • articulate the nature and significance of the non-technological issues that will bear on the practical effectiveness of the hardware and software infrastructures that are being created to enable collaborations in e- Science; • characterise succinctly the fundamental sources of the organisational and institutional challenges that need to be addressed in regard to defining terms, rights and responsibilities of the collaborating parties, and to illustrate these by reference to the limited experience gained to date in regard to intellectual property, liability, privacy, and security and competition policy issues affecting scientific research organisations; and • propose approaches for arriving at institutional mechanisms whose establishment would generate workable, specific arrangements facilitating collaboration in e-Science; and, that also might serve to meet similar needs in other spheres such as e- Learning, e-Government, e-Commerce, e-Healthcare. In carrying out these tasks, the report examines developments in enhanced computer-mediated telecommunication networks and digital information technologies, and recent advances in technologies of collaboration. It considers the economic and legal aspects of scientific collaboration, with attention to interactions between formal contracting and 'private ordering' arrangements that rest upon research community norms. It offers definitions of e-Science, virtual laboratories, collaboratories, and develops a taxonomy of collaborative e-Science activities which is implemented to classify British e-Science pilot projects and contrast these with US collaboratory projects funded during the 1990s. The approach to facilitating inter-organizational participation in collaborative projects rests upon the development of a modular structure of contractual clauses that permit flexibility and experience-based learning.

The Tough Gig: Being Salt and Light

Almost exactly two years ago, I was invited to speak at the Avondale Graduation for that year and had accepted. But unexpectedly, my wife was taken ill in late November and was dead by the 22nd of December. It was a very difficult time, but it was also a time in which life had a certain clarity. All sorts of things that had seemed important – the state of the house, the state of my finances, the state of my work –seemed suddenly far less significant. But relationships (with Beth, with my children, with our friends, with God), in those days and in the months that followed, became more and more clear. How important these were. It wasn’t that I gave up on the house, or my finances or my work, but it was clear that they were secondary priorities. I was to invest in things that would last, in things that, when the going was tough, had really been revealed to matter. In short, I was to invest in love

Unilateral Standards for Social Responsibility: Corporations as Social Watchdogs?

This paper focuses on the social dynamics of unilaterally determined social responsibility standards. These are put in the context of large customers in a supply chain determining company-specific standards, compliance with which is then a requirement for suppliers. We draw a brief comparison between multilaterally derived standards (such as those determined by the International Standards Organization) and unilaterally derived standards. Notably, there is an important difference stemming from the level of involvement and degree of control which the unilateral standard-setter has throughout the standard creation and implementation process. Indeed, we claim that the unilateral standard-setter which requires supplier compliance acts as regulator, monitor, and applier of sanctions to those supplier organizations. Ultimately, this puts the large corporation in the role of a Corporate Social Watchdog. In closing the paper we consider a future research agenda for this new concept