Tuesday 13 May 2008

Fostering e-infrastructure in Edinburgh

Last week I presented at the “Fostering e-Infrastructure: from user-designer relations to community engagement” workshop (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/880/) held at the National e-Science Institute in Edinburgh. The event was organised by Alex Voss from NCeSS (www.ncess.ac.uk).

The event focused on the difficulties of engaging non-traditional grid computing communities and the barriers, either real or perceived, that dissuade wider uptake.

I gave a presentation on the current outreach and awareness raising methods used at the NGS as well as discussing anecdotal evidence of barriers or problems. A particularly interesting presentation was given by Elpiniki Fragkouli from AHeSSC (www.ahessc.ac.uk) who is a research associate on the “Enabling Uptake of e-Infrastructure Services” project (http://www.e-researchcommunity.org/projects/e-uptake/). Initial results and findings were presented and it looks as though plenty of people have heard of the NGS so it looks as though the outreach mechanisms are working!

The workshop also contained plenty of time for discussion which was well utilised – my 30 minute talk ended up lasting an hour and 20 minutes! Representatives from NGS, AHeSSC, NCeSS and OMII-UK were all present and the discussions demonstrated that many of us face similar problems. Hopefully the slides from the meeting will be available soon.

A follow up meeting is planned in Manchester at the end of this month.

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