National Collaboratory Workshop

Natl Collaboratory photoWhile he was assistant director of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Dr. William Wulf coined the term “collaboratory” by combining the words “collaboration” and “laboratory.” Wulf imagined this as a “center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to geographical location. They would interact with colleagues, access instrumentation, share data and computational resources, and access information in digital libraries.

When Joshua Lederberg and Keith Uncapher organized a workshop (photo above) to explore this idea at the Rockefeller University in March 1989, I was invited to join. The group photograph above shows the members of the workshop (left to right): Mark Stefik, Keith Uncapher, Larry Smarr, Fred (Rick) Weingarten, David Kingsbury, Frank Halasz, Barry Leiner, Larry Rosenberg, James Ostell, Robert Kahn, Peter Freeman, Joshua Lederberg, Vinton Cerf, Thomas Malone, Alvin Thaler, Daniel Atkins, Lynn Conway, David Farber, Lee Sproull, Robert Sproull, Thomas Rindfleisch, Richard Rhodes, Herbert Schorr, Jonathan Postel, and Y.T. Chien. (Charles Brownstein, Craig Fields, Raj Reddy, and Harriet Zuckerman are not shown.)

There I led a subgroup to identify services and technologies that could provide the necessary infrastructure. A diagram that we produced is shown here.  Ultimately this led to a national program with several collaboratories in marine biology, astronomy, and other areas. The national academies published a book National Collaboratories: Applying Information Technology for Scientific Research about the program in 1993.

Colab Natl Collaboratory 3

Colab Natl Collaboratory 2Colab Natl Collaboratory 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SM Lederberg Cycle Scientific experimentationThese charts were intended as a generative  map to imagining how collaboratories could effectively meet the needs of distributed scientific enterprises.  The second row gives the logic of the approach. The elements here are exactly the elements of Lederberg’s process diagram for the work of a laboratory on the right.: science and engineering research functions. These including educating and mobilizing researchers, design approaches, analyzing data, publication, peer review, and so on. The lower rows were: collaborative functions, collaboration tools, enabling technology, and enabling theories. Creating this chart anticipated the logic of our later sensemaking whitepaper at PARC.

The top row of applications was intended to suggest areas of application for national collaboratories, including the human genome project, ecology projects, remote controlled telescopes, and so on. A wikipedia article describes collaboratories that have since been built.

 

 

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