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- Hublab Towards online collaboratories for global data gathering in social and economic history
Hublab Towards online collaboratories for global data gathering in social and economic history
Scholarly Communication - SURFshare Tenders
Status: Completed
A user-friendly, ‘light’ tool for communication, data gathering and data sharing was developed and tested by five international collaboratories in social and economic history.
Having an explicit workflow within the research process, a more mature tool and organising life demonstrations of the new tool are important for a successful implementation.
Further improvements to the platform will contain integration with e-mail, version management, a licence structure, clear intellectual property rights and possibly online manipulation of data.
HubLab aimed to create a platform to support communication and data-sharing of international collaboratories in social and economic history. The groups are stimulated by the International Institute of Social History, but their members are not
affiliated to the Institute.
The international character of the groups required a user-friendly, ‘light’ tool that would operate independently from the Institute’s internal system.
In the first stage of the project, leaders of four collaboratories were interviewed in order to gain insight in software requirements with respect to internal workflows, communication, security, version management of documents et cetera.
Subsequently, three platforms were tested (Sakai, Sharepoint and Liferay) on both the technical fit with the in-house ICT knowledge and the needs specified by the collaborator leaders. In this test, Liferay emerged as optimal candidate.
In the third stage of the project, Liferay was installed on five group sites. The leaders/ administrators were given a free hand to design their own platform and to stimulate their group member to make use of it. Demonstrations of the tool were planned to
coincide with conferences or workshops.
The platform proved relatively easy to install and to use, apart from several programming errors that caused delay. Eventually, the user test of the platform was largely limited to the administrators and the technical support team.
In the short period in which the test took place simply there was too little interaction between groups members to test the tool properly. And the tool is not mature enough to motivate and stimulate researchers to work with it. Although these problems occurred to some extent within the Hublab project, the effect was mitigated because the software was tested in no less than five collaboratories, ensuring that, overall, the software was tested on most of its functionalities.
The pilotproject has demonstrated that communication between researchers and IT developers demands more time and attention than anticipated. Researchers tend to have unrealistic expectations of applications, with respect to what they can achieve and the time in which they can be developed. Conversely, developers have difficulty to grasp the labor division within collaboratories. More time and energy should have been spent to make the Liferay platform more intuitively appealing for the user.
Life demonstrations seem vital for the acceptance of the platform. And best to do this at already organized meetings. A user guide in itself does not stimulate enough to try out the program. A possible alternative is video demonstrations for users with different roles.
Collaboratories (in the humanities), especially new ones, seem to be a rather vulnerable environment for testing new software, in particular in such a short period. And it is a risk to ‘rush’ scientific group activities for each group has its own planning of activities and pace of work which cannot be changed for a pilot project. However, the pilot project functioned in a sense as a ‘pressure cooker’, speeding up processes and decisions that otherwise may have been stalled.
The project has resulted in two kinds of knowledge. First, technical expertise on collaborative software, not only by installing and improving the Liferay package but by learning from the other groups in the SURF tender as well. Second, a better understanding of the interaction between the dynamics of research teams and the
(potential) role of communication software has been gained.
Further efforts to improve the platform will concentrate on three topics. First, further improvement of the ‘look and feel’, e.g. by adding demonstration videos, better navigation, make button labels unequivocal et cetera. Second, improvement of communication functionalities, in particular integration with email. Last, working on various aspects related to data-sharing: version management, a licence structure, intellectual property right and possibly online manipulation of data.