Brian Kelly wrote:
> We know (and thanks to the CLEX09 report, senior management will know)
> that externally hosted Web services are relevant to members of our
> institutions.
But why only members of one institution?
> The remit of those involved in the provision of Web services may be to
> support the aims of the institution.
And this just involves students and staff at a single institution?
Last week I hosted a research project meeting at Queens University
Belfast. People came from universities in Estonia, Scotland and Ireland,
the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, and a web development company in
Glasgow. Our starting point the work done by groups of 14-21 year olds
in Belfast and Tartu, members of youth organisations that do far more
interesting things online and off-line than they can do in school.
All of us need to collaborate electronically. But institutional
boundaries force us to use external Web 2.0 services and software
installed on a server in a university's DMZ registered to our own .eu
domain. There isn't any simple way to outside collaborators to most of
the services run by our own institutions.
> Here we're stating to talk about the relationship between Web services
> and identity management - which isn't really my area. But this is an area
> which the Eduserv Foundation's forthcoming symposium may be looking at (see
> http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/03/eduserv-symposium-2009.
> html).
I took a look at the programme. It is very interesting, but it still
assumes that research is centred in a few university institutions. In
social sciences there are lots of researchers outside the universities -
action researchers in the NHS, community and voluntary sector groups,
people working in government or subcontracted in market research
companies, think tanks, and so on. In practice, any research advance
comes from people collaborating with networks of people interested in
the same problems, no matter where they are based. The institution is
irrelevant, except as a conduit for funds, occasional support or
hindrance, and claiming credit for successes (but never the failures).
Years ago I proposed to design an equivalent to sourceforge.net designed
to meet the needs of social science research that involved people in
both the university and community sectors. But ESRC will not fund
software development, and the software is much too simple to interest EPSRC.
Now what if you started designing your services to support networks and
communities, not just registered students and staff? Would this result
in enough creative output to pull the UK out of recession?
--
Dr. David R. Newman, Queen's University Management
School, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland (UK)
Tel. +44 28 9097 3643 FAX: +44 28 9097 5156
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/
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