Abstracts
Achieving a ‘Facebook’ for Research. The potential for Research Administration to Become a Catalyst in the Success of ‘Platforms for Collaboration’.
Tuesday 5 May 2009, 1030 - 1100
Presenter: Simon Porter
University of Melbourne, VIC
Presenter Biography
Simon Porter works for the eScholarship Research Center at the University of Melbourne, and has recently made the cross over from the development of Research Administration systems to the development of support and engagement strategies for eResearch at the University of Melbourne
Abstract
This paper looks at the relationship between research administrators and researchers, and compares it to the relationship between the users of Facebook.com, and the company that supports it. Like many free services on the web, the financial drivers that allow Facebook.com to exist (the ability to target ads to users based on finely tuned demographic data), are significantly different to the drivers of its users (the need to socialize.) Because of these divergent drivers the Facebook.com product has features that users if asked wouldn’t necessarily want, like ads and a loss of ownership of data. On the other hand, because the value of the Facebook.com data set increases the more users and usage Facebook.com gets, the makers of Facebook.com are driven to provide applications of social value such as social networked photo albums that inform you when you have been tagged in a photo.
Within Australia, there is, in a positive sense, an opportunity to create a similar dynamic between research administration and the research community to that of Facebook.com, the Facebook application and its users. The arena in which this opportunity plays out is the Australian Government’s Platforms for Collaboration initiative which aims to significantly progress Australia’s “eResearch” Collaborative Infrastructure. The highly connected ‘Platforms for Collaboration’ vision for research practice shares a commonality with Facebook.com. In the same way increasing sections of the community conduct parts of their social lives ‘in’ Facebook, Platforms for Collaboration aims to be the ‘platform’ upon which a significant amount of research is actually conducted.
This paper will make the case that to effect such pervasive change in the research environment, Platforms for Collaboration will need to recognise that the drivers for Universities to participate in and support such platforms are broader than just responding to the needs of researchers. In fact the main catalyst for researchers’ mass adoption of the opportunities that Platforms for Collaboration creates may well be grounded and driven by the goals of university research administration, and the need for public identifiers for researchers and research projects. In this sense, this article will describe how research administration could become the catalyst in the success of Platforms for Collaboration to create a ‘Facebook’ for Research.
