[communities] GGF Proposal Submission

[rob.procter at ncess.ac.uk]

proposers_name: Rob Procter, Christine Borgman, Geof Bowker, Marina Jirotka, Gary Olson, Cherri Pancake, Tom Rodden, mc schraefel 
 
affiliation: National Centre for e-Social Science 

email: rob.procter at ncess.ac.uk 

proposed_title: Usability challenges for Grid infrastructure and tools 

session_type: Workshop 

proposed_duration: Full day 

target_audience: Usability experts, grid users, administrators, developers 

num_attendees: 30+ 

abstract: The workshop is the latest in a series of events on the theme of usability of Grid middleware and tools that have been organised over the past two years by the proposers. The outputs from this workshop will feed into plans for follow-on workshops at other relevant conferences. The aim is to draw on participants’ experiences as users, developers or administrators of grid middleware and tools in order to identify and begin to explore usability challenges for grids, and build on this over a series of workshops. 

synopsis: The Grid is a global project in technological innovation whose aim is nothing less than to bring about a radical transformation in research practices. The Grid vision is of data and information intensive, large-scale, distributed, dynamic and inter-disciplinary research collaborations. As the focus moves from concept demonstrators to generic middleware and tools supporting real user communities, and experiences of pilot projects are absorbed and analysed, important challenges for Grid usability are beginning to emerge: 

• How do we maximise and deliver the potential of grids to support new forms of scientific community?
• How do we exploit grids to support researchers’ expertise, new research methods and new forms of knowledge production? 
• How can we use grids to provide multiple perspectives on data – perspectives relevant to the research, business, policy and educational communities?
• What methodologies are best suited to evaluate grids and to feed this back to guide design and development?
• How do we re-design grid middleware and tools developed in pilot projects for specific users for re-use within a wider user community?
• How do we make generic grid middleware and tools configurable so as to meet the needs of diverse administrator and user communities?

This workshop seeks, within the context of the GGF conference, to engage the GGF community in the articulation of emerging cyberinfrastructure usability challenges and solutions.

Preparations for the workshop will commence with the CfP and the creation of a wiki (blog) to support the building of a record of pre- and post-workshop activities and of the event itself. Participation will be based on submitted papers but a number of key experts will be targeted as part of the call. Submissions will be reviewed by the workshop committee and accepted submissions will be made available on the workshop wiki.

Pre-workshop, participants will be invited to comment on submissions, refine and group themes, define research challenges, etc. We will use simple, universally available tools such as IM to support these activities. 

The workshop itself will begin with presentations of three or four position statements selected from accepted submissions. These will be followed by a plenary discussion on usability topics arising from participants’ experience of contributing to the pre-workshop activities, focusing on what worked and what didn’t, and on examining the reasons. Two breakout sessions will then be held. The first will focus around selected usability topics, followed by report back and discussion of findings. These will be used to seed the second round of breakout sessions which will focus on requirements for collaboration support. The workshop will close with a summary of the findings and their distillation into a GGF research agenda for usable grids.
 

tech_requirements: Availability of an Access Grid would be an advantage but is not essential.

Data projector, flip charts. 

prereq_participants: Experience as a usability researcher, grid user, administrator or developer. 

advertise_suggestion: GGF mailing lists, US and UK grid-related mailing lists.