Understanding Research 2.0 from a Socio-technical Perspective

Understanding Research 2.0 from a Socio-technical Perspective Yuwei Lin National Centre for e-Social Science University of Manchester http://www.ncess.ac.uk

Disclaimer This paper is not about  Dichotomy of Research 1.0 and Research 2.0  Imposing an ideal version of Research 2.0  Looking at the Research 2.0 activities from a technology-oriented perspective

Outline  Point of departure  Research 2.0 and its meanings and practices in different scientific disciplines  Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 design patterns  De Roure and Goble's 6 Principles of software design to empower scientists  MyExperiment development process  Challenges emerging in the development of Research 2.0 and possible socio-technical solutions

Web 2.0  Blogging  Bookmarking  File sharing (slides, photos, videos, tags)  Podcasting  Social networking  Co-authoring (wiki) http://web2logo.com/

The World of the Web 2  Communities  Connected and networked  Shared resources  Collective intelligence  Wisdom of the crowds

OpenWetWare #This page was last modified on 7 August 2008, at # To date 12:24. 5,133 users have edited # This over 10,335 page has pages. been accessed # Content is 624,219 available times. under GNU FDL or Creative

SciVee.tv

New kinds of data and new kinds of platforms Social scientists:  analysing Facebook messages, twitter messages, blog entries  understanding how Wikipedia is co- developed  exploring how YouTube and SlideShare can be used for disseminating scientific publications  how Second Life can be used for teaching

Open Access and Open Data  Open access journals  Open data: Ordance Survey data is not free/openly accessible. -> Open Street Map (Open Geo Data) sourcing crowd wisdom -> MapTube – developed by UCL Centre for Spatial Analysis (NCeSS Geographic Virtual Urban Environments node) Go voting at http://www.maptube.org/congestion/

Congestion Charge

Science 2.0 / Academia 2.0 Nature Publishing Elsevier B.V. Group DELL & COLLEXIS (LinkedIn-like)

O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Design Patterns 1. The Long Tail 2. Data is the Next Intel Inside 3. Users Add Value 4. Network Effects by Default 5. Some Rights Reserved 6. The Perpetual Beta 7. Cooperate, Don't Control 8. Software Above the Level of a Single Device

myExperiment.org myExperiment currently has 1286 users, 109 groups, 500 workflows, 139 files and 40 packs Open Source powered by

Workflows This workflow loads molecules from the database and than checks whether the perception of the atom types works or not. After the extraction of the database identifier from all molecules which caused problems during this process will the identifier be written to a file.

Reuse, repurpose workflows Use the local java plugins and some filtering operations to fetch the comic strip image from http://xkcd.com/ Based on the FetchDailyDilbert workflow. I just uploaded this example so I can play around with the myexperiment api.

The Distributed Team Develo Devel per, User, oper, PM, Amsterdam Manch Southa User, ester Manch mptonUser, Devel Manche oper, ester ster Manch Devel ester oper, Manch ester

De Roure and Goble's Six Principles Of design for adoption  Fit it, don't force change  Jam today and more jam tomorrow (incentives)  Just in time and just enough (delivery)  Act local, think global  Enable users to add value (empowerment)  Design for network effect (community)

De Roure and Goble's Six Principles Of user engagement  Keep your friends close  Embed users with developers and developers with users  Keep sight of the bigger picture  Favours will be in your favour (trust building)  Know your users (rarely there is one kind of users)  Expect and anticipate change

Socio-Technical Issues in the Development Process  How to keep up with the fast-paced Web2.0 development? -> agile management and development methods for a “Perpetual Beta”  How to involve users? User-centred? Who are the users? How to draw the boundary? Fostering existing Taverna user community or building new communities?How if they have different requirements?

Ethical issues  Privacy and confidentiality  Social networking websites usually offer the features of personal profiles and online logs of personal activities online.  Fear of being watched and monitored and screened.  Socio-technical solutions: security technology + awareness raising

Legal issues  Intellectual Property Rights  “Release early, release often” (mantra of the open source software community)? -> Concerned over being copied or scooped  Contradicting commercial interests if data is provided by private firms  Science Commons

Communication  VRE cf. Face-to-face contact  Behavioural change in a Web 2.0 environment  Languages  Trust  Socio-technical solutions: a better Graphical User Interface, Ajax, and Communication Space for improving human-computer interaction

Multi-disciplinarity  How to improve mutual understandings in a distributed and multidisciplinary environment?  Different terminologies and epistemological understandings (e.g, tagging and tag cloud)  Data in different and incompatible formats  Context and provenance  Socio-technical solutions: semantic web + social annotation

Methodological Innovation  Collaborative and distributed ways of conducting research  To reuse or not to reuse? - Trust building + Decision making + Social networking  Mutual shaping between technology and academia  A paradigm shift?

Developing a Research2.0 Site  Research powered by Web 2.0 technologies for multidisciplinary collaboration, maintaining relationships  Sharing, depositing, browsing, organising, annotating, reusing, recreating resources (e.g., data, tools, publications, experiences) in a virtual environment  Research 2.0 – social networking sites for scientists?

Research 2.0(?)  “[...] I am not sure we are building a full social networking site -- we are building a social curation site.”  “One of the things that makes myExperiment a quot;virtual research environmentquot; rather than a social networking site is that it has support for the particular research objects that people are using - we've focused on workflows and experiment plans just now.“

Future Research  Contexualising 'Research 2.0' is important – how Research 2.0 is perceived, adopted and practised for conducting what kind of work  How skills and knowledge are enacted in situ  How this supposedly democratic and seamless integration of distributed scientific work affects academic identities and shapes the social organisation of science.  Whether e-Science practices can be easily translated across boundaries.

Thank you for your attention. Yuwei Lin National Centre for e-Social Science University of Manchester http://www.ncess.ac.uk

Understanding Research 2.0 from a Socio-technical Perspective

by Yuwei Lin on Nov 12, 2008

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