CDI-Type II: Open Sourcing the Design of Civil Infrastructure (OSD-CI)

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI)Proposal Number: 0941565PI: Tracy Kijewski-CorreaInstitution: University of Notre DameTitle: CDI-Type II: Open Sourcing the Design of Civil Infrastructure (OSD-CI)In this project, a virtual organization (VO) is proposed that would allowing all stakeholders engineers, public officials, researchers, students, and even the public at-large to engage as "Citizen Engineers" to rehabilitate our nations deteriorating civil infrastructure. To this end, the award will address four dimensions of collaboration: harnessing human effort, tapping collective knowledge, pooling communal software and leveraging distributed computational hardware. Linux and Wikipedia serve as evidence that loosely organized teams can create and maintain the complex technical and intellectual infrastructure upon which society increasingly depends. These projects have succeeded not by accepting participants indiscriminately, but by creating a meritocracy that rewards expertise regardless of its source. OSD-CI is devised as a way that essential public-works projects could benefit similarly from the full expertise and latest advances available in the wider engineering community. The VO will use an archival Design Gallery, a Social Network, and a Tool Repository within an integrated cyberinfrastructure. The investigators expect that new types of discovery, education and engineering innovation will emerge to address the challenges facing civil infrastructure in an unprecedented fashion. Furthermore, the policies that result from this project are expected to define a new level of task complexity for problem-solving by crowds, thus providing a platform for new discoveries, insights and theories on the design and effectiveness of VOs that require extreme trustworthiness and openness.By addressing challenges facing civil infrastructure with OSD-CI, there will be direct benefits to society reliant on this infrastructure. Furthermore, the social fabric of the OSD-CI Collaboratory provides a new paradigm for engaging the public at large in the research and design enterprise. It will offering new means of collaboration and networking among "Citizen Engineers." In addition, it will also aid education and mentoring of students worldwide, particularly those in developing areas lacking access to such opportunities locally. Eventually, OSD-CI is envisioned to become a virtual Town Hall where members of the public interface with decision makers, engineers, architects and planners to contribute to processes directly impacting them and their communities. Once the precedent is set, these open-source communal concepts could be extended to other fields as a basic framework and model for the effective use of VOs for addressing societal challenges.