Creating Sustainable Cyberinfrastructures

Abstract

In this paper we report the results of a qualitative research study of the GENI cyberinfrastructure: a program of four federated cyberinfrastructures. Drawing on theories of stakeholder positioning, we examine how different GENI stakeholders attempt to enlist new participants in the cyberinfrastructures of GENI, and leverage existing relationships to create sustainable infrastructure. This study contributes to our understanding of how cyberinfrastructures emerge over time through processes of stakeholder alignment, enrollment, and through synergies among stakeholder groups. We explore these issues to better understand how cyberinfrastructures can be designed to sustain over time.

Educational Outreach & Stakeholder Role Evolution in a Cyberinfrastructure Project

“…We examine how these CI resources are positioned by expert users and administrators in the GENI project to be functional for stakeholders in educator roles-teaching and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students in lab or classroom settings-so that they can use the CI and its resources in their teaching. We find that these positioning practices [14] enable existing stakeholders in the GENI organization to use the project's resources in settings beyond the primary research context as well as to work to draw new potential stakeholders into this CI's community. This research investigates the following research question:…”

“…Previous research shows that cyberinfrastructure projects are sustained and maintained by perpetually aligning and realigning relationships among people, practices, technologies, and organizations [9,13,14]. In our previous work on sustainability in the same cyberinfrastructure we are investigating in this paper [14], we posited that the development and maintenance of CI projects requires the constant addition of new stakeholders, especially as users drop away over time. We proposed that establishing a process whereby new users can be constantly recruited is necessary for the cyberinfrastructure project to succeed.…”

“…II. LITERATURE REVIEW Scholars across multiple disciplines including eScience, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Information Science [8,9,[13][14][15] have been investigating the development of cyberinfrastructures since the mid-2000s [3,16,17]. Cyberinfrastructures are comprised of high-performance computational and networking technologies, very large data sets ("big data"), and a multimorphous human infrastructure that most often engages multiple organizations and stakeholders [4].…”

“…The human infrastructure is a complex array of social and relational aspects. Cyberinfrastructure projects differ from many traditional types of systems in that their users and stakeholders are not always specified or known ahead of time [19,26], nor do they have a fixed physical, cultural, or organizational boundary in which they operate [14]. They are embedded within and across multiple organizations, technologies, and communities of practice, often simultaneously [18].…”

“…In our prior work on GENI [14] we drew upon synergizing and actor-network theory [29] to understand stakeholder positioning practices in CI development. They focus on the relationships necessary to create and maintain a functional CI.…”