jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #60 on 05 Feb 2021 and has tags Working With A Research Community: Other, Strategy: Marketing, Strategy: Product/Service Management
If you build it, promote it, and they trust you, then they will come: Diffusion strategies for science gateways and cyberinfrastructure adoption to harness big data in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) community - Kerk F. Kee, Bethanie Le, Kulsawasd Jitkajornwanich
Software packages, like ideas, don’t in fact speak for themselves. Getting any sizeable number of people to adopt a new idea, new practice, or new tool requires enormous amount of coordinated communication effort. In this paper, Kee, Le, and Jitkajornwanich describe what they found to be kept practices to increase the adoption of research computing tools - in this case science gateways and cyberinfrastructure. And why would we build tools if not to have them adopted?
Based on an analysis of 83 interviews with 66 administrators, developers, scientists/users, and outreach educators of SG/CI, we identified seven external communication practices—raising awareness, personalizing demonstrations, providing online and offline training, networking with the community, building relationships with trust, stimulating word‐of‐mouth persuasion, and keeping reliable documentation.
Relatedly, I’ve recently discovered the Open Source Guides which have brief but good overviews of what you should be thinking about to get users for your open source software, building communities, best practices for maintainers, and developing formal governance when it’s time.
