Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice: Governance of EA-CoP
The iMarine project is providing tools to create synergies in the communities behind the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries and the Conservation of Marine Natural resources. The main goal of the initiative is to establish these synergies, while the data management and infrastructure are the powerful tool at the perusal of these communities.
The establishment of a viable and vibrant EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. is the central driver behind all activity.
Preliminary questions to answer
The governance model must be adapted to the scale of the initiative.
How to govern a EA-CoPCommunity of Practice.? The issue is to make the target clearer since solutions are different depending on the level of scaling-up.
Define Community. Governance of which CoPs? There is a need for a better definition of the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice., e.g. is it a world of statisticians, of modellers, of oceanographers, of data crunchers?
Define Practice, a number of questions which can address different levels of concerns:
At a high level:
A tool to create/support synergies among sub-communities for applications, data and expertise sharing In addition to the exchange of data, iMarine needs to offer a platform for discussion and exchange of opinions: if the communities don’t come together because of different political agendas, the data collected will not be used. The concept of "dashboard" might provide a response to this requirement. The dashboard is integrated to the infrastructure, allowing sharing of data and results as well as supporting group discussions, in a secure environment. Industry and NGOs would have an interest in this form of collaboration. What is the practice regarding communities with little IT capacity, how do these interact with the infrastructure. Current examples could be Smartfish and FishFinder. iMarine needs to decide where the boundaries are, with clear interfaces defined.
At a medium level:
Use of infrastructure services in a unilateral way by a community. CERN Inspire scenario was such example. This is likely to interest many communities. The issue will be to bring the gaps between core infrastructure services and specific community needs Use of virtual Research Environments for promoting collaboration among communities
At a practical level, the practice can be defined with reference to concrete business cases:
BC1/ ICIS-SPREAD: fishery statisticians, information managers BC1/CFRAME: BC2/VME-DB: information managers, fishery scientists, industry scientists BC2/biodiversity: BC3/Smartfish: Fishfinder: fishery scientists
Define the scale ?
When ? we should define as a target what the community will be at the end of the project
Start by consolidating the existing user groups. The approach can be “organic growth” (stepwise) with a nucleus (statisticians and/or deep seas communities seem to be possible CoPs) from which emulation can see an expansion of the CoPCommunity of Practice. connecting iteratively with other groups, up to the universe (e.g. the global EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. Deep seas).
Once the components of CoPCommunity of Practice. are identified, the Governance structure should include a small advisory board for each CoPCommunity of Practice. that can decide/influence governance.
Governance structure should respond should respond to the need to create synergies among communities. Committees should bring together actors belonging to different communities but having similar profiles. Cross-committees mechanisms should ensure pathways and dialogue among groups of actors and consistent decisions at higher level. The current community bodies/forums concerned in the iMarine project should be mapped as well as their relationships and critically reviewed.
Other questions
In aiming at bringing together different communities (e.g. VME and EBSA), Politics are often blocking, so it is necessari to consider the risks of competition with existing CoPs having different political agendas (for instance, for Deep Seas, InDeep could argue that they are the federators).
