Difference between revisions of "Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice Overview"

Revision as of 16:56, 6 May 2012

This page is dedicated to document the activities of the Ecosystem Approach 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. (EA-CoPCommunity of Practice.).

It is organised in the following areas.

The iMarine Board

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.

The iMarine Board area contains:

• the overview page briefly describes this board;
• the work plan page describes the work plan of the schedule governing board activities;
• the meetings page documents the events organised to support the board activity including their reports, recommendations and conclusions;

Requirements

The Requirements area contains:

• the iMarine Business Cases page which combine technical requirements with organizational, political and managerial issues; they specify larger organizational concepts that may be supported by one or more VREVirtual Research Environment.'s. The page on business cases describes these from the technology perspective. After all, this is the technical wiki. Other information on organization and operation in support of the Business Cases can be found in the iMarine Board Channel.

• 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.

• 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.

Governance

The Governance discussed in this chapter 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) are achieved.

The Governance area contains:

• the Sustainable use of the data e-Infrastructure page;
• the Governing mechanism recommendations page;
• the iMarine Policies page;
  • the EA-CoP Data Access and Sharing Policies page;
• the iMarine Guidelines and Best Practices page;

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:

• ...

• the EA-CoP Milestones page organizes content that relates to the realization of EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. Milestones, and that does not specifically belong to the cluster or requirements sections.

The power of a large infrastructure is evidenced by the quick mobilization of resources to be chained in a workflow. A set of VREVirtual Research Environment.'s or other resources could be composed where the output of one becomes the input of the next. One such example is SPREAD where based on Timesseries objects and Geospatial intersections, both provided through a VREVirtual Research Environment., a re-allocation must be made based on a range of assumptions. Such a group of interactive VREVirtual Research Environment.'s may also be in need of external data that can be quite dynamic, and rely on interoperable infrastructures.

The EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. Discussion page will contain different sections on internal meetings, links to documentation, links to relevant iMarine Board Channel sections etc.