RAPID: Stakeholder Alignment for EarthCube

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Large-scale collaborative science is of increasing importance, but relatively little empirical evidence is available to guide the creation and operation of these multi-stakeholder efforts. Previous social science research on stakeholder alignment in industrial relations and organizational studies is only now beginning to be applied to scientific consortia. Early results indicate that social science tools and methods can play a key role in enabling coordinated, cross-organizational alignment. New techniques for identifying stakeholders, assessing interests, and visualizing alignment are beginning to emerge, but require additional refinement. This is a time-bound, demonstration case for applying stakeholder alignment methods initially advanced under the NSF study of 'Stakeholder Alignment in Socio-Technical Systems' (NSF-VOSS 0956472). This case will demonstrate new ways for stakeholders in complex systems to better visualize and analyze core interests (common and conflicting) in order to more quickly and more comprehensively achieve the alignment needed for understanding and action. It is anticipated that this application of the methods will highlight needed areas for further instrumentation, validation, and enhancement. The NSF EarthCube initiative represents a novel approach to rapid development of community-guided cyber infrastructure to integrate data and information for knowledge management across the Geosciences. Optimizing these activities will require a deep understanding of stakeholder interests, including points of alignment (or misalignment). This project will identify EarthCube stakeholders and their interests and develop, administer, and analyze the results of an initial stakeholder alignment survey to assess the state of the EarthCube cyber infrastructure, geoscience, and computer science communities prior to the planned June community meeting. Timely feedback on this survey will be central to the success of the overall EarthCube effort, and enable longitudinal analysis of changes as the EarthCube process moves from separate communities, through the initial organization of emergent interdisciplinary teams and eventual community integration. Stakeholder alignment is hypothesized to play an important role in community coalescence and team development and to affect the likelihood of successfully defining system requirements and building prototypes. This project provides an opportunity to test the applicability of innovative stakeholder alignment techniques to emerging geo-sciences, cyber infrastructure and computer science partnerships focused on developing common frameworks for sharing research data. Improved stakeholder alignment will substantially enhance the success and impact of EarthCube. The resulting cyber infrastructure will create value and mitigate risk in domains touched by the geosciences. Further, based on this demonstration case, applications to a wide range of NSF investments may be appropriate. These tools and methods for stakeholder alignment represent potentially high impact enablers across our societal institutions that are of ever greater importance in an era of accelerating change.