Katherine A. Lawrence

Red Light, Green Light: Making Sense of the Organizational Context for Issue Selling

This paper analyzes the contextual cues female managers attend to when considering raising gender-equity issues at work. Study 1 provides a qualitative look at the range of cues indicating context favorability, including demographic patterns, top management qualities, and cultural exclusivity. Study 2 experimentally manipulates these cues and reveals that the exclusiveness of organizational culture is the most potent cue affecting willingness to sell a gender-equity issue. A discussion of mediators sheds lights on why cultural exclusivity affects issue selling.

Walking the Tightrope: The Balancing Acts of a Large e-Research Project

Although e-Research has received much attention and acclaim in recent years, the realities of distributed collaboration still challenge even the most well-planned endeavors. This case study of an e-Research project examines the ‚balancing acts’ associated with multidisciplinary, geographically distributed, large-scale research and development work. After briefly describing the history and organizational design of this information technology and atmospheric science research project, I identify five paradoxical challenges that cannot be resolved: research versus development, harmony versus conflict, consensus versus top-down decision making, frequency and modes of communication, and fast versus slow pacing. Although collaboration and communication technologies supported the project’s management and organization, most of the complexities faced by the team were not technological in nature. From the five paradoxical challenges associated with the project, I distill three cross-cutting issues that could be relevant to other e-Research projects of this magnitude: satisfying the multiple needs of a multidisciplinary project, managing information, and engaging all participants. I identify the practical implications of these challenges and issues, specifically that organizational and low-tech solutions – not the introduction of more sophisticated technology tools – are needed to solve these challenges and to better streamline coordination.

Science gateways today and tomorrow: positive perspectives of nearly 5000 members of the research community

Science gateways are digital interfaces to advanced technologies that support science/engineering research/education. Frequently implemented as Web and mobile applications, they provide access to community resources such as software, data, collaboration tools, instrumentation, and high‐performance computing. We anticipate opportunities for growth within a fragmented community. Through a large‐scale survey, we measured the extent and characteristics of the gateway community (reliance on gateways and nature of existing resources) to understand useful services and support for builders and users. We administered an online survey to nearly 29,000 principal investigators, senior administrators, and people with gateway affiliations. Nearly 5000 respondents represented diverse expertise and geography. The majority of researchers/educators indicated that specialized online resources were important to their work. They choose technologies by asking colleagues and looking for documentation, demonstrated reliability, and technical support; adaptability via customizing or open‐source standards was another priority. Research groups commonly provide their own resources, but public/academic institutions and commercial services also provide substantial offerings. Application creators and administrators welcome external services providing guidance such as technology selection, sustainability planning, evaluation, and specialized expertise (e.g., quality assurance and design). Technologies are diverse, so flexibility and ongoing community input are essential, as is offering specific, easy‐to‐access training, community support, and professional development. Copyright

Science Gateways Institute Survey

Science gateways are digital interfaces to advanced technologies that support science/engineering research/education. Frequently implemented as Web and mobile applications, they provide access to community resources such as software, data, collaboration tools, instrumentation, and high‐performance computing. We anticipate opportunities for growth within a fragmented community. Through a large‐scale survey, we measured the extent and characteristics of the gateway community (reliance on gateways and nature of existing resources) to understand useful services and support for builders and users. We administered an online survey to nearly 29,000 principal investigators, senior administrators, and people with gateway affiliations. Nearly 5000 respondents represented diverse expertise and geography. The majority of researchers/educators indicated that specialized online resources were important to their work. They choose technologies by asking colleagues and looking for documentation, demonstrated reliability, and technical support; adaptability via customizing or open‐source standards was another priority. Research groups commonly provide their own resources, but public/academic institutions and commercial services also provide substantial offerings. Application creators and administrators welcome external services providing guidance such as technology selection, sustainability planning, evaluation, and specialized expertise (e.g., quality assurance and design). Technologies are diverse, so flexibility and ongoing community input are essential, as is offering specific, easy‐to‐access training, community support, and professional development. Copyright

Who cares about science gateways?: a large-scale survey of community use and needs

With the rise of science gateway use in recent years, we anticipate there are additional opportunities for growth, but the field is currently fragmented. We describe our efforts to measure the extent and characteristics of the gateway community through a large-scale survey. Our goal was to understand what type of support services might be provided to the gateway community.

Opening science gateways to future success: The challenges of gateway sustainability

To make research and development investments where they will have the most impact, it is critical to understand why some science and engineering gateway or portal projects change the way that science is conducted at a fundamental level in a given community. This paper provides some initial reflections on a June 2010 focus group with the goals of uncovering some of these characteristics of success and generating practical insights that draw on the strength of multidisciplinary perspectives. We identify five key tensions that are challenges to gateway sustainability, and we offer policy recommendations that could benefit future gateway projects.

Roadmaps, not blueprints: paving the way to science gateway success

As science today grows ever more digital, it poses exciting challenges and opportunities for researchers. The existence of science gateways---and the advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) tools and resources behind the accessible Web interfaces---can significantly improve the productivity of researchers facing the most difficult challenges, but designing the most effective tools requires an investment of time, effort, and money. Because all gateways cannot be funded in the long term, it is important to identify the characteristics of successful gateways and make early efforts to incorporate whatever strategies will set up new gateways for success. Our research seeks to identify why some gateway projects change the way science is conducted in a given community while other gateways do not. Through a series of five full-day, iterative, multidisciplinary focus groups, we have gathered input and insights from sixty-six participants representing a diverse array of gateways and portals, funding organizations, research institutions, and industrial backgrounds. In this paper, we describe the key factors for success as well as the situational enablers of these factors. These findings are grouped into five main topical areas---the builders, the users, the roadmaps, the gateways, and the support systems---but we find that many of these factors and enablers are intertwined and inseparable, and there is no easy prescription for success.

Science Gateways: The Long Road to the Birth of an Institute

Nowadays, research in various disciplines is enhanced via computational methods, cutting-edge technologies and diverse resources including computational infrastructures and instruments. Such infrastructures are often complex and researchers need means to conduct their research in an efficient way without getting distracted with information technology nuances. Science gateways address such demands and offer user interfaces tailored to a specific community. Creators of science gateways face a breadth of topics and manifold challenges, which necessitate close collaboration with the domain specialists but also calling in experts for diverse aspects of a science gateway such as project management, licensing, team composition, sustainability, HPC, visualization, and usability specialists. The Science Gateway Community Institute tackles the challenges around science gateways to support domain specialists and developers via connecting them to diverse experts, offering consultancy as well as providing a software collaborative, which contains ready-to-use science gateway frameworks and science gateway components.

The Science Gateways Community Institute at Two Years

The Science Gateways Community Institute was one of the first two software institutes funded by the National Science Foundations Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in August, 2016. The structure of and services offered by the institute were developed as a result of seven years of planning grants that funded focus groups, a 5000-person survey and the development of a strategic plan. Now two years in, we provide an overview of the institutes service offerings and their usage, reflect on the experiences of some early clients, review our approaches to metrics and evaluation, and describe some lessons learned. We also describe the lightweight, adaptive management approach employed by the institute. SGCI is organized into five service areas: Incubator, Extended Developer Support, Scientific Software Collaborative, Community Engagement and Exchange, and Workforce Development. This paper will highlight early successes in all five areas, from client achievements to conference experiences to our impact on students. We highlight areas where the institute has evolved --- based on community feedback --- from what was originally envisioned. We describe our use of the Entrepreneurial Operating System as a lightweight management approach for a highly adaptive organization. Finally, we include early plans for the execution phase of the institute.