AN AGILE APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT OF CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE GOVERNANCE

Governance of geosciences cyberinfrastructure is a complex and essential undertaking, critical in enabling distributed knowledge communities to collaborate and communicate across disciplines, distances, and cultures. Advancing science with respect to “grand challenges," such as global change, weather prediction, and Earth system science, depends not just on technical systems, but also on social systems for strategic planning, decision-making, management, learning, teaching, and building a community of practice. Simply put, a robust, agile technical system depends on an equally robust and agile social system.

An agile development process is underway for governance of transformative investments in geosciences cyberinfrastructure through the NSF EarthCube initiative. Agile development is iterative and incremental, and promotes adaptive planning and rapid and flexible response. Such iterative deployment across a variety of EarthCube stakeholders encourages transparency, consensus, accountability, and inclusiveness.

A project Secretariat acts as the coordinating body, carrying out duties such as planning, organizing, communicating, and reporting. A broad coalition of stakeholder groups comprises an Assembly (Mainstream Scientists, Cyberinfrastructure Institutions, Information Technology/Computer Sciences, Science Communities, EarthCube End-User Workshop Organizers, Professional Societies) to serve as a preliminary venue for identifying, evaluating, and testing potential governance models. To ensure broad end-user input and buy-in, a crowd-source approach will engage the larger community. An Advisory Committee from the Earth, ocean, atmosphere, social, computer and information sciences guides the process from a policy point of view. Developmental evaluators from the social sciences embedded in the project provide real-time review and adjustments.

While a large number of individuals and organizations have agreed to participate, additional community-selected leaders yet to be identified will play key roles through an Assembly Advisory Council, to ensure an open and inclusive process. Upon consensus on a governing framework, a community-selected demonstration governance pilot will help facilitate community convergence on cyberinfrastructure system design.