Federation 2.0 

Agenda and links to notes

9:00-17:30 (GMT+03:00) Eastern European Time - Tallinn in the “Science Class” room


Axis discussion


Our scenarios should tell a story. Then we will

  1. consider  the differences or similarities in the way scholarship, education and research is carried out in the stories  
    1. Different scales and priorities between research and education, global vs local vs national -- the scenarios may affect research very differently than education
  2. Consider the experiences of the individual users, the “middlebodies”, and the service providers in the  stories  
  3. THEN how do federations resist or align the trends in the different stories to support scholarship, education, and research.

that could inform the conceptual plane in which we would locate our scenarios (protected google doc).

Tensions from the working group

To prepare for the workshop, the working group had reviewed the survey results and interview responses, looking for the conceptual spaces of most uncertainty. The four resulting tensions were presented at the workshop.

Mission of The Academy: Internal vs External Priorities

What academic objectives are pursued and how they are pursued is always subject to many forces. Researchers, scholars, and pedagogists discern how best to advance their disciplines. Funders, politicians, regulators, and providers of services to communities have their own agendas and needs and advance them in part through influencing activities of The Academy.

Resources for The Academy: More vs Less

Governments, public and private organisations, and students all contribute to the bottom line of each academic organisation to varying degrees that are subject to an extremely complex mixture of external economic and political forces. Individual academic organisations differentiate and compete for their share of the pie. How does The Academy respond when the pie gets substantially smaller or larger?

Impact of Social-Technological Change on The Academy: Slower vs Faster

In what ways does The Academy change due to changes in the way its researchers, scholars and students conduct other aspects of their lives, and how quickly does it respond to those pressures? Do academics want their academic life to be like the other aspects, or do they want it to remain apart and with its own character? What happens if the response is too slow? What happens if it is too fast?

Inequity in The Academy: More vs Less

Those with more resources urgently want to solve their problems and move on. But their solutions can be out of reach of those with fewer resources, limiting their participation in forwarding the mission of The Academy. Will they be left behind, or what will propel participation to be global?

Workshop selection of tensions

The workshop group began the selection questioning whether funding levels across departments affected delivering the tools for collaboration and research: "It is not necessarily true that it’s more expensive to run a collaboration platform for physicists vs mathematicians." We touched on the interactions between funders and what is researched, how different fields are influenced by different funders. In some fields the funding is more closely directed by researchers in the field, approving projects that advance the field. In other cases, funding is used to motivate research in particular topics. The societal values of different ares of research are reflected in the differences in funding across disciplines: inequities that may be similar to the difference in funding levels in different areas of the world.  We returned over and over to the influence that funders have on shaping how and what research is done.

The working group's suggested tension of the rate of change became subsumed by

We had some discussions about the boundaries of the academy, touching on  academic publishers, independent scholars, and citizen scientists, and acknowledging the large technology companies that also influence the academic landscape.


(Alan) Is this where outsourcing will go, which would introduce its own constraints? (Lucy) External priorities for funding would also go here

Independent researchers  - Tinder for research

Outsourcing - I will survive


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