Category: Science, technology & society

Charlie Schweik, associate professor of environmental conservation and public policy, gave an invited keynote address at the Military Open Source Software Conference in Atlanta Georgia on August 31, 2011.

Titled “Successful Internet Collaboration: A Study of Open Source Software Commons,” Schweik’s address drew on his extensive research concerning the use of open source software nationally and internationally and its potential for generating productive collaborations among researchers and others.

The purpose of the Atlanta conference was to discuss the benefits and challenges of open source technologies for military applications, and to encourage the U.S. defense and homeland security agencies to move toward “open” technology adoption policies and to share and reuse information technologies across agencies, levels of government, and between government IT contractors.

Schweik is also an associate director of the National Center for Digital Government (NCDG); an affiliated researcher with the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Initiative; and founder and co-director of the UMass Open Source Lab.  His research on open source software systems and collaborations has been supported by a prestigious NSF Early CAREER Development Grant.

Schweik’s forthcoming book on the open source movement is scheduled for publication by MIT Press in the spring of 2012.

Charles Schweik, associate professor of environmental conservation and public policy, has received confirmation from the National Science Foundation that it will fund a doctoral consortium on open source software research that he is organizing. The consortium will be held on October 5, 2011, in Salvador Brazil prior to the 7th International Conference on Open Source Systems. The grant will fund eight U.S. doctoral students to attend the consortium and the OSS 2011 conference.

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way organizations and individuals create, distribute, acquire and use software and software-based services. OSS has challenged the conventional wisdom of the software engineering and software business communities, has been instrumental for educators and researchers, and has become an important aspect of e-government and information society initiatives. OSS is a complex phenomenon and requires a interdisciplinary understanding of its engineering, technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.

The goal of the doctoral consortium is to provide PhD students with an environment in which they can share and discuss their goals, methods and results of their research, and get advice and reactions from others before their dissertations are completed. For more information about the conference, visit http://ossconf.org/.

The Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse (ESENCe) Beta Project released “Ethics Day: Engaging Librarians in the Responsible Conduct of Research,” a report summarizing the main points of discussion from a workshop convened to advance knowledge and practice for ethics among library and information scientists. Ethics Day sought to identify opportunities for library science involvement in the development of appropriate ethics education across disciplines. The workshop was designed to provide librarians with new knowledge about research ethics and to demonstrate possible roles for libraries as institutions consider new ethics trainings or requirements.

Ethics Day extended findings from a 2009 ESENCe workshop, “Ethics in Science and Engineering: Redefining Tools and Resources, ” which explored the potential to leverage the university’s role as a locus of education and mentoring for ethics and RCR in science and engineering and the potential and limitations of digital tools, including social media, for supporting such growth. A report from the Redefining Tools and Resources workshop is available online.

The ESENCe beta site project was a digital repository of materials on ethics and the responsible and ethical conduct of research in science and engineering. It partnered the National Center for Digital Government; the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; the Science, Technology and Society Initiative; and the Center for Public Policy and Administration.  ESENCe was developed in response to the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act, which required that proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF) have “a plan to provide appropriate training and oversight in the responsible and ethical conduct of research to undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers participating in the proposed research project” (Sec 7009). While NSF has always encouraged ethical conduct of research, the America COMPETES Act made this requirement explicit and created an opportunity to better compile and disseminate ethics research results and related education materials. Accordingly, the project sought to examine and test the potential of information science to provide effective tools to coordinate materials from across disciplines and to develop a  web-based portal that would connect faculty and researchers to the best available materials to promote ethics in research, training, and practice. More information abotu ESENCe is available at its website.

The Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse (ESENCe) beta project released “Ethics in Science and Engineering: Redefining Tools and Resources,” a report detailing findings from an October 2009 workshop of the same name.

The workshop objectives were twofold: first, to explore the potential for leveraging the university’s role as a locus of education and mentoring for ethics and RCR in science and engineering and, second, to explore the potential and limitations of digital tools, including social media, for supporting such growth. It was prompted by recent legislation requiring all proposals for funding from the National Science Foundation to “certify” that appropriate “certify” that appropriate responsible conduct of research (RCR) plans were in place at the time of submission.

Workshop findings explored the need for a broader, multi-disciplinary ethics community of practice and to incorporate social science research into ethics theory and practice. They discussed the potential for emerging Web 2.0 and social media technologies to transform ethics education and value of open access, easily accessible materials for training.

ESENCe was eighteen month initiative led by the National Center for Digital Government, the Science, Technology and Society Initiative, the Center for Public Policy and Administration, and the University Libraries.

The report is available for download here.

Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government was an invited speaker at North Carolina State University’s “CI Days at NCSU: The Excitement and Future of Cyberinfrastructure,”  which took place September 7 and 8 at NC State.

CI Days explored how “some of the top minds in the world wrestle with how CI can be used to reach technological, organizational and intellectual goals.” Fountain’s presentation, “Cyberinfrastructure and Networked Governance,”  explored the Obama campaign — the first to use social media extensively — and the administration’s Open Government Initiative. Her presentation was part of a panel of experts who discussed how cyberinfrastructure can help institutions reach their organizational potential.

“Understanding cyberinfrastructure,” said Fountain “is important for understanding innovation, progress, and institutional change.” According to Fountain, typically slow-changing bureaucracies are using technology to improve business processes and increase transparency and accountability. Implementing these new technologies, however, does not create an immediate transformation.  In the case of government, “civil servants and organizational cultures play critical roles in allowing organizational change. These and other institutional characteristics of organizations must be fully examined before we can understand the true impact or potential of a new technology.”

CI Days was sponsored by Sponsored by Internet2 through a grant from the National Science Foundation, the NC State Office of Information Technology, and NC State’s Institute for Computational Science and Engineering.