Networking impediments and opportunities
From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)
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JJ Bogardi, Global Water System Project (GWSP) at EGIDA, Bonn:
Nature of Networking Projects: Complex funding; mixture of paid and voluntary; multiple obligations; international; differing project maturity; governance, cultures
Which glue keeps it together? Trust and personal affinity. Common objectives and scientific values. Mutual respect. Mutual benefit (win-win). Complementarity. Donor dictate
Lethal“ ingredients. Turf mentality. Budget discrepancies. Too much competition. Lack of data and information exchange. Donor jealousy
- Clear statements about obstacles: no clear structure; no dedicated funding and no clear idea(s) yet how to do it.
- Opportunities, fixes: ID manageable work packages; Find, organize, distribute reusable components, resources; Create win-win situation
Impediment Slide
- Differing requirements, agendas, goals, timelines
- Need to plan in advance, adding requirements/needs mid-course
- Mismatched funding / mismatched development cycles
- Stale, incomplete
- Open source community efforts versus off-the-shelf software
- Difficult to keep open source software going over the years
- Require resources staff/$
- Is it reliability?
- Don't trust open source
- Unclear expectations/requirements of the community
- Need for clear, simple documentation/instructions
- Group needs to add feedback/experience to documentation
- Responsibility to maintain structure
- Changing/evolving standards and approach - Interop burnout
- Too many new things - how to know where to focus?
- Governance needs - limited resources, growing needs
- Support vs. documentation vs. development
- Organisation of community software development: formal vs. informal; need for some sort of steering group with a mandate to take decisions
- Unidata - started as small grant to look at needs
- Challenges of real-time systems
- Modifications needed to be made to the software for data coming in frequently
- performance