Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation: Selected Papers

A special issue of First Monday (Volume 12, Number 6 — 4 June 2007), edited by Brian Kanin, is devoted to papers that were originally presented at this conference held at the U.S. National Academies on January 29-30, 2007. The objective was "to look at how cyberinfrastructure as an evolving enabling vision (rather than a given that merits protection) faces the innovation landscape beyond NSF’s academic constituency. It’s not just a matter of the social and economic impact of cyberinfrastructure, or the constraints that markets, laws, and policies impose on cyberinfrastructure. Rather it is a matter of designing an optimal ecology for knowledge and innovation, drawing on what can be done with science, software, organizations, and policy. This challenge is both technical and political. It is a challenge of how to get infrastructures — including infrastructure implicit in laws and markets — to work together as well as they work internally. This is a crucial test for both interdisciplinary collaboration and U.S. innovation policy. It is also the ultimate challenge of 'virtual organization' — not as the virtual organization in the sense of a like–minded knowledge–centered community but as a process for harnessing distributed heterogeneous resources (including expert individuals and institutions) in pursuit of common goals and objectives."

Thanks Brian both for organizing the meeting and editing the special issue. Thanks also for alerting me to its publication!