INSPIRE: ENABLING TRANSFORMATION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, GEOSCIENCES, AND CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE THROUGH STAKEHOLDER ALIGNMENT AND NEW INSTITUTIONAL THEORY, METHODS, AND ANALYTICS

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This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Directorate of Geosciences and Office of Cyberinfrastructure as part of their committment to EarthCube, a major new NSF cyberinfrastructure activity to create a bold, integrated, geoscience data and knowledge management system for the 21st Century, and by three Programs in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (Science of Science and Innovation Policy; Science, Technology, and Society; and Science of Organizations). This is transformative, interdisciplinary, research that enables more effective design and implementation of community-driven cyberinsrastructure that will create an interoperable system of data systems and data types that serve a broad and disparate community of geoscience users with different backgrounds, needs, and scientific cultures. The research will also pioneer new social and behavioral science theory, methods, and analytics that address new and emerging ways that stakeholders are aligned around big, complex, infrastructure projects. The research is transformative in nature because it is a first-of-its kind project in which a major NSF community-driven infrastructure project of this magnitude has incorporated, as an integral part of its project structure, social science and an analysis of the community/stakeholder building process. It also breaks new ground in the developing of quantitative approaches to measure the evolution of collective community and individual perceptions over time. This type of understanding is critical when building trust and partnerships between science and technology communities that rarely, if ever, interact. The project involves the intimate interaction of social scientists, geoscientists, and cyberinfrastructure and computer science experts, with the results of the stakeholder studies being used to help improve the cyberinfrastructure design-and-build process, as well as guide the formation of the organizational and governance structures that will be needed to effectively manage community engagement and implementation of the final system. This research employs novel visualization tools and will develop innovative quantitative means for assessing stakeholder agreement and its evolution over time. The analysis of data and results will assist in identifing the most effective targets for infrastructure investment and understanding and improving community engagement in the design process, thus ensuring that whatever is created adequately serves end-user needs. Broader impacts of the work include the training of PhD students, accelerating progress in large NSF-initiated science and technology projects, and generating insights that will inform policy, planning, and resource allocation.