Re-engineering the User Community website
A research-centric focus on our community resources
The EGI website is an important resource which brings together information about all facets of the organisation's activities and goals. But, for the User Community Support team (UCST) these pages represent the key gateway into our services. Like many new organisations, our pages began life reflecting the structure of the business divided as they were across the tasks and sub-tasks of the Inspire project as well as EGI itself. Whilst this is no bad thing in the early days as people are becoming familiar with the post-EGEE world and coming to terms with the new organisation, the time has come to move on.
Over the last couple of weeks UCST, in conjunction with colleagues from the dissemination team, have been rethinking these pages in order to produce a design that is firmly centred around serving the needs of the user community. In addition to clarifying who our users are we had two specific challenges to address. Firstly, the solution must be scalable: that is, new services and communities can be added without a major redesign and within our available resources. Secondly, we did not want to duplicate information for different audiences.
Who are our audiences?
Two weeks ago I attended the final meeting of the Preparatory Project to construct the LifeWatch infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research. I was particularly struck by a talk given by Terry Parr (NERC, UK) who had been responsible for planning and running the service centre for this phase of LifeWatch. The point that hit home with me, was the importance of including the needs of policy makers when designing support services. As Terry put it, we don't just bring services together to make life easier now, but rather, so that in the future we, collectively, can accrue the benefits of collaboration between subject disciplines and research communities in order to contribute to improving the chances of survival for the planet. Heady stuff indeed!
The focus of our function is, of course, to meet the needs of researchers within the various research communities or Virtual Research Communities (VRCs). I am aware that there continues to be occasional misunderstandings over what the term Virtual Research Community means and this is something that we can explore. To some extent this will always be the case as communities, by definition, are not tied down to hard and fast rules. You might not be able to define a community but you know when you feel that you are part of one.
Turning inwards, we also have a role to play in facilitating support services and information flows that meet the needs of partners within the [project, in particular the various teams within the NGIs etc.
Who are our communities?
A couple years ago I was fortunate enough to hear Nancy Wilkins-Diehr speak at an EGEE conference in Barcelona. Nancy runs the Science Gateway programme for TeraGrid in the USA. The aim of this initiative is to support and nurture sustainable gateways and portals for the various research communities that make use of the TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure. I see a lot of parallels with what we are now doing over here within EGI. They define a TeraGrid gateway as being: a community developed set of tools, applications, and data that is integrated via a portal or a suite of applications, usually in a graphical user interface, that is further customised to meet the needs of that community. When I spoke to Nancy at the Barcelona conference she explained how the degree of support that the various communities required varied considerably and that there were no set rules.
This very much follows my thinking. We will continue to develop services (Applications database, VO management, training etc.) and activities (workshops, presentations, consultancy) that help communities however, fundamentally, they will create the gateways that meets their own needs.
One of the new functions that will be added to the website will be an overview of the current state of the gateways for the main communities. We will list what we are aware of, so feel free to send us your suggestions.
How should we do this?
So, to get clear in my mind what questions these web pages need to answer, I reflected on the six classic questions that the writer Rudyard Kippling referred to as his six honest servants: what, why, when, how, where and who:
What?
What do we do? We must describe clearly exactly what we, UCST, do.
Why?
We are implementing a scalable, federated solution to support services: we must explain why.
When?
When will things happen? The users will need to know exactly when events will take place and when new features will appears.
How?
How do I, as a researcher, engage with these processes? This must be clearly explained.
Where?
Where are you (UCST)? And where else can I find you? Answer: at the EGI forums, workshops, conferences, Amsterdam.
Who?
Who are you? As individuals (people) and as an organisation (with a vision) - explain.
Incidentally, the web-based also enable us to lean upon the benefits of the ITIL approach to service desk management in that we have in the UCST a single point of contact. There are multiple channels in the website, the email address, the RT system and phone lines but everything comes back to UCST.
If you have any comments or questions on this whole process - do let me know. I'll say more as the new site evolves.
