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Collaboratory
projects to date vary enormously in how much and what kinds
of data were collected about the technical development process,
the actual experiences of users, and the ultimate success
of the collaboratory in accelerating scientific progress.
Data about both technical and social aspects of performance
are necessary in order to develop broad principles. On the
development front, many initial projects developed custom
software, but others are now using commercial applications.
 On
the behavioral front, in our collaboratory projects we have
made extensive longitudinal observations of the behavior of
our participants both prior to the deployment of collaboratory
technology as well as after the deployment of a succession
of new tools. In some cases (e.g., SPARC/UARC), these observations
span a number of years. The published literature on collaboratories
provides a scattered and incomplete record of what actually
happened in other projects. We expect that in many cases others
who have carried out collaboratory projects have much richer
insights into what happened than is available in the published
literature. In order to collect this rich data, we need a
framework for asking the right questions about usage, and
a venue in which to collect and codify the findings.
The best way to extract broader insights from both our own
data as well as the experiences of others is to hold a series
of focused workshops that ask a systematic set of questions
across all of these projects. The initial series of workshops
will focus on analyzing the experience of collaboratory developers
and formulating a broad framework for gathering the results
together. We will conduct structured interviews with those
involved in different collaboratories, using a preliminary
framework that includes issues at several levels:
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- the
underlying network and distributed computing infrastructure,
- the applications developed and used,
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the modules of software functionality that turned
out to be the most useful,
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the usage and satisfaction data from users,
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and the social and organizational issues that arose.
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We
expect that initial discussions may lead individual investigators
to return to their data for further analyses that they report
in later workshops. We would also expect the workshops to
lead to the identification of other kinds of projects that
need to be done to further refine the framework.
Our workshops to date:
Social Underpinnings (June 4-5 2001)
Technical Underpinnings (July 19-20 2001)
Comparative Investigations (September 25-27 2002)
SKESE (November 25-26 2002)
Comparative Investigations, Part Two (June 18-20 2003)
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