If We Build It, Will They Come? The Cultural Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure Development

In this chapter, we show how Hofstede’s cultural constructs help explain the dysfunction we observed in the early history of the George E. Brown, Jr., Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), a large-scale deployment of cyberinfrastructure intended to link 16 experimental facilities around the United States. The NEES project involved participants from three distinct professional cultures: civil engineering, computer science, and program managers at the U.S. National Science to conflict, with the more risk-averse civil engineers and program managers frequently aligned against the more risk-tolerant computer scientists. In the discussion, we consider successful techniques for accommodating differences in professional cultures and offer a set of lessons learned based on experience with the NEES project Cyberinfrastructure and the “Third Way” The convergence of information technology and research, in what some have called “cyberscience” (Nentwich, 2003), represents a potentially revolutionary change in the conduct and organization of scientific inquiry. Specifically, recent expert reports, such as by the National Science Foundation’s blue-ribbon panel on cyberinfrastructure (Atkins et al. 2003), suggest that advances in computing and networking may transform intellectual work in ways similar to the transformation of physical work that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. That is, just as innovations in physical infrastructure unleashed new forms of production and distribution, innovations in cyberinfrastructure are expected to foster new discoveries based on the ability to capture and analyze more data at increasingly higher resolution, to generate simulations with greater detail and accuracy, and to interact and collaborate with colleagues independent of time and distance. In particular, noting the theme of this collection around “converging technologies,” it is important to emphasize that to a great extent, the