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

Revision as of 15:27, 31 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 two areas:

• The iMarine Board area which introduces the board, the rules governing its functioning, the working plan and the meetings;
• The Outcomes area which describes the results of the iMarine Board activities, namely (i) the definition of requirements characterising the expected infrastructure and (ii) the definition of policies governing the envisaged infrastructure;

The iMarine Board

The iMarine Board is a key mechanism for guaranteeing constant interactions with the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. initiatives involved in the project. This board is described through a number of pages:

• the overview page briefly describes this board;
• the iMarine Board Rules and Procedures page describes the regulations and principles supporting the operation of this board;
• the work plan page describes the work plans of the scheduled governing board activities;
• the meetings page documents the events organised to support the board activity including their reports, recommendations and conclusions;

Outcomes

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 focus on sustainability, and to formulate a set of organizational and technological policy recommendations regulating the resources shared and services provided by the infrastructure.

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:

• ...