OCI: VOSS: Stakeholder Participation and the Emergence of Dominant Design in Large-Scale Cyber-Infrastructure (CI) Systems

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Cyberinfrastructure systems are large-scale information systems that are built for the purpose of supporting scientific collaboration within and across disciplines, research fields and subfields. Although scientific advances in an increasing number of disciplines depend on the development of cyberinfrastructures, the processes by which such systems are designed are not well understood. The proposed study will contribute to an understanding of how cyberinfrastructure systems are designed and developed, and in particular, how their design emerges out of social influence processes among the project stakeholders. The study will investigate the role that different stakeholders play in the design and development process, the ways in which their interests and priorities are aligned, and the social organization of development efforts. A qualitative study will be conducted to examine the collaboration and social influence behaviors of scientists, project managers, team leaders, experimenters, and campus CIOs and other stakeholders during the design and development of multiple clusters within the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project, a unique virtual laboratory for at-scale networking experimentation. The project will describe the processes of collaborative design and development of cyberinfrastructure systems and identify interventions that might help promote the alignment of various stakeholder groups' interests and priorities. By examining the process by which alternative designs are evaluated and the nature of stakeholder participation in design decisions, this study will contribute research and practical knowledge to the area of CI and large-scale IT development. Collaborations among institutions conducting work on social and organizational aspects of cyberinfrastructure systems will be established to more efficiently define common concerns. Be contributing to a more sophisticated understanding of how cyberinfrastructure development evolves over time, this project will simulate and support the development of future cyberinfrastructure systems improving our ability to enable the computational and data-enabled science and engineering required to address significant societal challenges such as disaster response, energy efficiency, and public health.