Nurturing a community based sustainability model

Support and outreach structures in Scratchpads

Livermore L. & Koureas D.

Biodiversity Informatics Group | Department of Life SciencesNatural History Museum, London

Maintenance

Funding application

Project starts

Project ends

Development phase

No further funding or gap in funding for development

?

The ephemeral lifecycle of a project

680 Biodiversity Information projects

“…telephones do not crash; power supplies do not

fluctuate; and clocks do not halt (in general). Similarly,

a computational tool (…) must be reliable across

time, it must be maintained.”1

1 Ribes D., Finholt T.A. 2007 Proceedings of the third International Conference on e-Social Science

Project InfrastructureDiscoveryIndividualistic

EphemeralOptionalRisk taking

ImplementationCommunal / agreed

PersistentEssential

Robust & reliable

adapted from Patterson D. 2013, Tempe, Arizona

Transition from

Maturation indices?

Sustainability criteria?

Funding for maintenance?

How can we secure the future of our projects?

but…

so…

Post-project sustainability is always a major concern

“An infrastructure must be taken as a process instead of a system.”

Shift in the way we think of e-infrastructures and information resources

Stable/rigid system Dynamic/open process

Outsource to the end user community

We need to set up the environment that will enable the community contribution

Koerten, H. & van den Besselaar P. (2013) Sustainable Taxonomic Infrastructures: System or Process?

ScratchpadsVirtual Research Environments

91,631 taxa

544 Scratchpads

6,644 active users

Data

curation

Data

analysis

Data

publishing

Data collection &generation

aseamless

workflow

Infrastructure maintenance

Technical maintenance

Open source & modular

User support

Crowdsourcing support activities

Maximising support

efficiency

Two basic pillars

Community based sustainability model

Ambassadors programme

Share enthusiasm and vision Usage experience Geographically distributed and cross-domain

20 ambassadors in 16 countries

Crowdsourcing the support activities

Give talks about Scratchpads

Arrange for or give training courses

Act as focal point of local Scratchpad expertise

Promote the use of Scratchpads in their community

Provide support to new local Scratchpad user communities

Provide support to local users in languages other than English

12

3

45

6

Ambassadors programmeCrowdsourcing the support activities

Ambassadors programmeCrowdsourcing the support activities

planned and organised training courses by Ambassadors

Ukraine

Cameroon

Malaysia

Train users

Raise awareness | Promote platform

On-siteTraining

Crowdsourcing the support activities

Train trainers

16 courses in 2013

Crowdsourcing the support activities

On-line

3 online courses in 2013

Global reach

Low cost

Participants from Australia, Africa, Europe

Training

Project management – Issues queue

Bug reports

Feature requests

Support queries

Redmine open sourced project management system

> 1,200 issues / year

Maximising support efficiency

61% processed within a day1

81% processed within a week1

1 Brake I. et al. 2011. Zookeys 150 doi:10.3897/zookeys.150.2191

Issue

Development Team

SupportTeam

Team member

user

Maximising support efficiency

Project management – Issues queueStraight-forward workflow

Co-learning environment

Wiki based documentation site

DocumentationMaximising support efficiency

> 115,000 views

Consistent theming | Constant update

Maximising support efficiency

Documentation

1 Embracing a commons philosophyAdopt CC licences for all support content

Maximising support efficiency

2 Improve cost/benefit ratioAdopt open-source support software

3 Keep open communication channelsSustain intuitive communication tools

4 Study your end-user basePerform sociological studies

Could a community support model alone be the solution?

Could any our projects follow a Wikipedia paradigm?

Probably not yet

Hybrid models will need to be applied

Conclusions

Anchor to core funding | Maintain through development | distributed models

but…

“In order to support research, development and

maintenance we must either

change reward structures or

incorporate new kinds of participants in Cyber-infrastructure efforts.”

Ribes D., Finholt T.A. 2007 Proceedings of the third International Conference on e-Social Science

Research

Development

Maintenance

Thank you