Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice: The iMarine Board

Overview

“The primary goal of the iMarine Board is to define the data e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large. governance model, with a sustainability focus, and to formulate a set of organizational and technological policy recommendations regulating the resources shared and services provided by the infrastructure.”

This goal will be achieved by the Board by providing assistance and recommendations to the iMarine e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large. partners in orchestrating the activities to ensure an effective exploitation of the e-infrastructure. The Board has a primary role in outreach and marketing of the e-infrastructure, and its activities range from identifying opportunities for collaboration and sharing of resources, to organizing the collection of requirements, support to implementing solutions, and ensuring packaging of outcomes in manageable resources.

The Board is convened for formal meeting sessions every 6 months.

Formal aspects of the Board (mandate, membership, officers, decision making process, operational policies, ...) are defined in Board’s Rules and procedures.

The Board operates by defining among it’s members and the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. a range of objectives, and the work plan to achieve these. The objectives are verifiable outcomes that will be validated to measure project success.

Rules and Procedures

The June 2012 version of the Rules and Procedures governing the operations of the iMarine Board is available here

Criteria for prioritization

The Rules and Procedures refer to a set of criteria that govern the prioritization setting of initiatives in the Board's decision making process.

These criteria were agreed at the iMarine Board kick-off meeting, They are:

• Users now;
• Co-funding;
• Project structural allocation of resources;
• Clearly referred to in the iMarine Description of Work;
• Related to EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. business cases;
• The proposed actions support sustainability aspects relevant to the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice.;
• Consistency with EC regulations/strategies such as INSPIRE;
• Re-usability with clear benefits to EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. representatives and proven compatibility with EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. resources.

Overall workplan

WP3 objectives and activities

Project activities involving the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. take place under WP3. These activities are organized according to the three main objectives:

1. Operations of the iMarine Board:

• Meetings of the iMarine Board
• Meetings of the iMarine Advisory Council
• Mobilization of/mediation with the wider EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. concerned by the three Business cases

2. Governance and Policy developments

The Governance relate to the activities of the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. where they interact with the e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large.. It describes how Deliverable D3.2 (M10) and D3.3 (M29), that report on this governance, are achieved.

• Development of the Sustainability plan
• Development of Governance model
• Development of Data Policies
• Development of Software Policies
• Development of guidelines and best practices

3. Harmonization of systems and schemas

Harmonization activities are organized by technical clusters and can be validated through the VREs set-up to serve the Business cases

• VREs planning
• Technical Clusters: Statistical; Biodiversity; Geospatial; Semantics

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Status of Board's overall workplan after Board 1 meeting

At its first session, the iMarine Board has initiated the elaboration of an overall workplan which spans across the entire project duration. This workplan provides an overview of Board's activities and related timing expectations, and is used to identify possible conflicting use of project resources in order to decide on priorities.

• The Board Work Plan overview in Excel format (Registration required)

• The Cluster Work Plans page describes the work plans scheduled by the technical clusters;

Implementation results

This section describes the tangible outputs of activities listed in the above workplan

Mediation with the CoPCommunity of Practice. concerned by the Business cases

iMarine Board meetings

They constitute the primary mechanism for mediation among the EA Community of PracticeA term coined to capture an "activity system" that includes individuals who are united in action and in the meaning that "action" has for them and for the larger collective. The communities of practice are "virtual", ''i.e.'', they are not formal structures, such as departments or project teams. Instead, these communities exist in the minds of their members, are glued together by the connections they have with each other, as well as by their specific shared problems or areas of interest. The generation of knowledge in communities of practice occurs when people participate in problem solving and share the knowledge necessary to solve the problems. directly involved in the project. The meetings page documents the events organised to support the board activity including their reports, recommendations and conclusions;

• iMarine kick-off meeting
• First iMarine Board meeting - this meeting has elaborated the iMarine Board Rules and Procedures ; this page describes the regulations and principles supporting the operation of this board;
• First Advisory Countil meeting - this meeting has brought together for the first time the 5 advisors who were presented the iMarine's objectives and strategy and the potential for the platform.

Mobilization through outreach

The mediation efforts of the iMarine Board are primarily geared towards serving the three Business cases. The iMarine Business Cases page describes policy driven business needs which will eventually be supported by one or more VREVirtual Research Environment.'s.

The iMarine Board must first mobilize the concerned CoPCommunity of Practice.; this mobilisation effort calls for liaison and outreach activities to the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice., as identified by the iMarine Board:

• BC2 - Presentation of iMarine to High Seas Deep Seas VME community (December 2011)
• BC3 - Presentation of iMarine to GEF/ABNJ Tuna project (FAO team in February 2012; Steering Committee in June 2012)
• BC1 - Presentation of iMarine to DG-MARE (June 2012)
• BC3 - Presentation of iMarine to Smartfish Indian Ocean community (July 2012, Harmonization workshop)
• Attendance of the ICES Conference

Negotiation phase

A second phase in the mobilization requires more targetted mediation efforts in order to progressively refine which are the more specific needs which iMarine can address in support of the concerned CoPCommunity of Practice. and business case.

BC1 - Development of FAO's Tuna Atlas, an ICIS use case (May 2012): the goals are to text the implementation of FAO's Tuna Atlas use case through the ICIS VREVirtual Research Environment. and evaluate its strenght and weaknesses towards further promotion of ICIS in the CoPCommunity of Practice.

Governance

Conclusions of the D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. project and the first iMarine forums stress that the Governance proposal must be adjusted to the business model and to the size of the CoPCommunity of Practice. which can be expected at the end of the iMarine project. Developing a governance proposal is therefore tightly related to the sustainability plan.

• the Sustainable use of the data e-Infrastructure page;

• Governance page;

Policies constitute key Governance instruments. The iMarine project will develop Data oriented policies, and Software oriented policies. See the iMarine Policies page;

The first draft of iMarine Data Access and Sharing policy has been presented at the first iMarine Board meeting

• the EA-CoP Data Access and Sharing Policies page;

Guidelines and best practices enable a practical implementation of the above policies through more user oriented description:

• the iMarine Guidelines and Best Practices page;

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Harmonization of systems

Board's objectives include organizing the collection of requirements accross the three Business cases, providing support to implementing solutions, and ensuring packaging of outcomes in manageable resources. This sub-set of objectives are articulated under the "Harmonization of systems".

As mentioned above, the response to Business case needs will be delivered through a set of VREs. Furthermore, the first iMarine Board meeting has described how a team work organized by technical clusters can better contribute to achieve harmonization of schemas and IT solutions across business cases.

The Requirements area contains:

• the VRE planning page which describes the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. desiderata in terms of a composition of services and resources, delivered as a packaged single unit to the CoPCommunity of Practice.. A VREVirtual Research Environment. provides a defined set of services for a specific group of users that collaborate on a specified task or workflow. An alternative approach to VREs are gCube apps. In the context of the CoPCommunity of Practice. desiderata, no difference is made.

• the Clusters page describes how the CoPCommunity of Practice. organizes the requirements collection and discussion on high-level topics in a set of organic, but also technological clusters; geospatial, biodiversity, statistics, and semantic technologies all are supported by technologies that overlap in functionality with other clusters, yet are still easily identifiable as falling within one of the clusters.

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Validation

According to the Description of Work, the goal of this activity is (i) to document status and issues on harmonization approaches, and (ii) to validate implemented policies and business cases, their functionality and conformance to requirements.

The Validation area contains:

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