Social Life of Information

I attended my first NSF workshop earlier this week at UC Irvine; the hospitality and sunshine were delightful. The workshop was a great opportunity to meet others who are interested in similar research questions and who deal with the same challenges in dealing with FLOSS data. It was also a nice chance to put some of my learning from my teaching practicum with the Science Data Management course, although the class hasn’t progressed all the way through the relevant topics that would apply to the workshop focus on FLOSS research infrastructure. The combination of experiences should provide a useful context for me when it comes time to write an NSF grant proposal this summer, especially because one of the benefits of attending this workshop was learning a lot more, from insiders’ perspectives, about how the NSF funding works for these types of projects.

The workshop experience was new for me; a handful of invited participants made presentations and the discussion of their content formed the base of the program, unlike many workshops which are based on presentations of position papers or work in progress. I presented a couple of slides demonstrating the use of Taverna Workbench to replicate prior research that uses the FLOSSmole data repository. After a day and a half of “think tank” discussions, many participants had to fly home, but a few of us stayed an extra evening (due flight schedules, among other things) and we put together a draft outline of the workshop report for the funding agency. Developing the workshop report was probably the best part for me - it gave a nice summary and review of everything that had transpired, with intense discussion among the few of us who remained. We wrote it collaboratively, sharing a document with Google Docs, so even though I didn’t really say much, I was able to contribute “legitimate peripheral participation” in the form of writing. The workshop web site was another such case; it was designed for collaborative content contribution, and I posted some of my notes for posterity. So instead of blogging here about the content of the workshop, it was blogged on the workshop site.

One thing that was notable to me is how overwhelmingly male-dominated this area is. This is not just because computer science is underpopulated by women, but the gender disparity is apparently even more extreme in FLOSS development and research. The evidence at this workshop was the attendance of just two women in a group of 20 participants - only 10% - which I found slightly mystifying, given the nearly equal gender balance on the SU FLOSS research team. In fact, I think we have more women than men in the FLOSS group right now. However, a key detail is that I’m the only “data geek” among them (like the other female workshop participant, who’s into data mining) and this might be true for the broader population. It doesn’t put me off; if anything, a gender imbalance in this regard indicates good opportunities for people like me. But I do wonder why it is so…