Agile Management: Strategies for Developing a Social Networking Site for Scientists

Research 2.0 (or Science 2.0) is the term commonly used to describe Web 2.0-based platforms for supporting collaboration in scientific research (e.g., Waldrop, 2008). This paper, based on our experience of developing myExperiment, a site that enables scientists to share digital resources associated with their research (De Roure, Goble and Stevens, 2007), aims to identify and detail good practice for the development of Research 2.0 sites. We are especially interested in explicating how the project is managed so as, on the one hand, to maintain rich user engagement in the face of uncertain and evolving requirements and to exploit the malleability of Web 2.0 technologies, while, on the other, keeping the project on ‘track’. Our interest then is in ‘agile management’, with how the flexibility and responsiveness encouraged by ‘agile’ approaches and facilitated by ICT tools can be combined with managerial requirements for coordination, measuring progression, identifying and meeting targets and so on; and with the organizational rationale and consequences of ‘perpetual beta’.