CNI News

Some of you may have attended a virtual workshop hosted by the US National Academies in November 2020 which introduced a draft toolkit for fostering open science practices. This September, the Academies are holding a launch event for the report of that workshop, which will also include case studies following on from the workshop exploring ways in which the toolkit can be used.

Information on the event and the background work can be found here:

https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/09-30-2021/developing-a-toolkit-for-fostering-open-science-practices-proceedings-of-a-workshop-release-event

There’s no charge, but you do need to register in advance for the event.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Fall 2021 Membership Meeting. At this time, we expect to hold BOTH a virtual event and an in-person event, each independently of one another, and designed to complement each other. The virtual event will take place online Dec. 6-9; the in-person event will take place Dec. 13-14 in Washington, DC, at the JW Marriott Hotel.

Anyone may propose a project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Live (synchronous) time slots will be reserved for topics that would particularly benefit from interactive discussion. Speakers may request to present a live (synchronous) project briefing (either virtually Dec. 6-9 or in-person Dec. 13-14), though a very small number of proposals will be selected for synchronous or in-person presentation; the great majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. If the in-person event shifts to virtual due to public health considerations, in-person project briefings scheduled for Dec. 13-14 will move to virtual synchronous sessions on Dec. 13-15. Once accepted, speakers who are selected for live sessions will be contacted regarding the schedule.

We strongly urge all those presenting synchronous project briefings (virtual or in person) grant CNI permission to record and make their session subsequently available.

Project briefings focus on a timely topic or on a specific institutional/organizational project related to digital information; they can also explore parallel developments across institutions. Briefings address state-of-the-art developments and issues of interest to the membership, as have been outlined in CNI’s Program Plan (https://www.cni.org/program) and recent Executive Roundtable reports: (https://www.cni.org/tag/executive-roundtable-report). Management of data, digital content, and institutional information resources; digital preservation; innovations in teaching and learning; and infrastructure to support research are topics that consistently engage CNI members’ interests.

A limited number of project briefings will be accepted.

Proposals may be submitted via online form:
https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2021/project-briefing-proposals-f21
Deadline for submissions is October 11, 2021

More information, including a preliminary schedule-at-a-glance, is at https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2021.
Follow the meeting: #cni21f

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

The August 31, 2021 Wall Street Journal carried an article on the strategic Cloudlab initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. See

https://www.wsj.com/articles/carnegie-mellons-cloud-lab-to-automate-labor-intensive-science-experiments-11630348526?page=1

This is an important development that we highlighted  in our most recent Executive Roundtable on Research Continuity, see

https://www.cni.org/go/future-research-enterprise-june-2021

CNI will continue to track developments in this area, and I continue to welcome updates from other institutions doing related work.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

CNI is pleased to be a cooperating organization for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) again this year.

JCDL 2021 will be online, Sept. 27-30, 2021.

Registration is open: https://2021.jcdl.org/registration/

Advanced registration ends Sept. 20

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

The Internet Activities Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force are convening a very interesting and unusual workshop (invitation copied below) exploring what might be done analyzing the extraordinarily well documented and open record of standards-making and related developments for the internet over the past decades. I thought that this invitation might be of interest to some CNI-announce readers who perhaps might not have seen it.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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Show me the numbers: Workshop on Analyzing IETF Data (AID), 2021

Web Page: https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/aid/

The IETF as an international Standards Developing Organization hosts
diverse data on the history, development, and current activities in the
development and standardization of Internet protocols and its
institutions. A large portion of this data is publicly available, yet
this data is arguably underutilized as a tool to inform the work in the
IETF and research on topics like Internet governance and trends in ICT
standard-setting.

This workshop aims to enable engineers and researchers alike to mine the
IETF’s data sources in order to explore trends through the analysis of
IETF data, such as email archives
<https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/>, I-Ds
<https://www.ietf.org/standards/ids/>, RFCs
<https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/>, and the datatracker
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/>. This work can be used to derive
insights into the inner workings of the process of standardization,
participation, and governance[1]. This workshop aims to bring together
people who have already analyzed IETF data, those who are interested in
the analysis of IETF data, and those who are interested in the results
of such analysis as input for improvement of the IETF’s work.

We invite the research community, IETF participants, and others with an
interest in the data collected by the IETF, its protocols, and
participants, to submit a contribution to the workshop. Furthermore, we
also welcome participants who are interested in the analysis that could
be performed based on this data as well as those contributing
considerations regarding future collection and handling of IETF data.

Possible avenues for explorations include, but are not limited to:

A. What are patterns for participation in the IETF (what are
predictors for a long and productive tenure, when do people stop
participating, what is needed to successfully produce RFCs)?
B. How is the IETF community developing (i.e., affiliations,
publications, language, nationality, leadership positions)?
C. How do affiliations develop in the IETF (i.e., does a change in
affiliation translate into a change in behavior, is there a
relation between affiliation and leadership positions and/or
centrality, what is the affiliation distribution per area and/or
WG)?
D. What social dynamics (gender, nationality, income, occupation, and
other social dynamics) are not captured by IETF data and what data
and research approaches are needed to develop further insights in
the social dynamics of standardization?
E. How productive and effective is the IETF, with respect to
documents, pages, words, letters and in comparison the overall
activities e.g. on mailing lists?
F. How well is the outcome of the IETF used, e.g,. based on references
to RFCs in research papers, product manuals, or other sources?
G. What data would be relevant to collect that is not collected yet or
what should be considered with respect to handling of personal data
during the data collection and research.
H. How effective is the IETF’s consensus-based decision making
process? Is there evidence that documents receive broad and
effective reviews? Are experts with relevant expertise engaging
with developing standards in a timely manner?

Participation and Submission

People interested in participation are requested to submit short
position papers (500-1000 words). The paper can cover one or multiple of
the following points, but this list should not be considered exhaustive:

1. Research questions and interests in IETF data; indication which
question should be answered, the data needed to do so, and how
these insights could be used to improve processes and operations;
2. Description of the IETF data they aim to analyze or the information
they would like to see made available to inform their work (such as
mailing list archives, or participation data obtained through the
datatracker) and their methods for doing so (see footnote 1);
3. Potential and preliminary findings; and how those insights could
either benefit leadership, WG chairs, and authors/participants,
and/or society and industry at large;
4. Potential or preliminary findings and how those add novel insights
to ongoing academic debates.

Proposals for data analysis should also contain a brief consideration of
any related ethics and privacy issues. The basic principles of ethical
research are outlined in the Belmont Report2 (covering e.g., respect for
persons, beneficence, and justice) and/or institutional ethics
guidelines.

The workshop will be invitation-only. The organizers will decide whom to
invite based on the submissions received. Therefore, please indicate
your interest by submitting a research proposal by September 29, 2021 to
aid-workshop-pc@iab.org.

The Program Committee members are Niels ten Oever (chair, University of
Amsterdam), Colin Perkins (chair, IRTF, University of Glasgow), Corinne
Cath (chair, Oxford Internet Institute), Mirja Kühlewind (IAB,
Ericsson), Zhenbin Li (IAB, Huawei), Wes Hardaker (IAB, USC/ISI).

All inputs submitted and considered relevant will be published on the
workshop web page. Sessions will be organized according to content, and
not every accepted submission or invited attendee will have an
opportunity to present as the intent is to foster discussion and not
simply to have a sequence of presentations.

Position papers from those unable to attend in person are encouraged. A
workshop report will be published afterwards.

Logistics

• Submissions Due: 29 September 2021
• Invitations Issued by: 15 October 2021
• Workshop Date: November 29 – December 3 2021
• Location: Online and at the University of Amsterdam (COVID-19
permitting).

The workshop will consist of three parts:

1. opening workshop (Monday)
2. hackathon (Tuesday – Thursday morning)
3. closing event (Thursday afternoon)

Feel free to contact the program committee with any further questions
(including questions related to available data or expected outcomes):
aid-workshop-pc@iab.org.

—–
[1] Examples of such approaches are:
https://www.arkko.com/tools/docstats.html,
http://datactive.github.io/bigbang/,
https://csperkins.org/research/protocol-standards/2020-12-10-ignacio-iesg-talk/2020-12-10_IESG-50-years-IETF-send.pdf,
https://sodestream.github.io/impact-of-early-engagement-on-longevity-of-ietf-participation.html

[2] https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/sites/default/files/the-belmont-report-508c_FINAL.pdf

The University of Oregon, in partnership with the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will host the “Digital GLAM Spaces: Building a Community of Practice for User Experience and Accessibility Conference.” The one-day virtual event will take place on November 10, 2021. The event themes of building community around user experience and web accessibility align well with issues of interest to many within the CNI community.

Proposals will be accepted through September 10th, 2021.

See the event website for details: https://glamalliance.uoregon.edu/

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

I wanted to share the announcement for the annual Pacific Neighborhood Consortium meeting. I’ve attended many of these over the years, and they are consistently full of interesting material in my experience.

I don’t know how the sessions are going to be scheduled in terms of time zones, but hopefully they’ll be available for subsequent replay as well.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

—————————————————————————————————————–
PNC 2021 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings

Call for Participation

Main Theme: Sustainable Digital Heritage

Dates: September 28-30 (Tuesday-Thursday)

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/pnc2021/
Online Registration: https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/surl/pnc2021/reg
Keynote Speakers: see below

Dear Colleagues,

We welcome you to join us at PNC 2021. Due to the ongoing uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s conference will be held online. The theme of PNC 2021 is “Sustainable Digital Heritage.”

About PNC
The Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) was founded at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. In 1997, the administrative operations were transferred to the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, a leading academic institution in Asia. Since then, PNC has encouraged scholars, academic institutions, and universities to collaborate and exchange their academic resources and research expertise through annual conferences, which have been held across many countries for 24 years.
The mission of the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) is to facilitate information exchanges among institutions of higher education in the Pacific Rim through computing and communications technology. PNC explores issues of information and technology exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of the cultural knowledge contents. In fostering access to digitized data on the Pacific Rim, the PNC serves as a portal for access to digital research. It helps scholars to find the library, archive, and museum materials needed to support both teaching and research. The ultimate goal is to enable scholars to regard themselves, not as separated by vast distances, but as residents of a virtual neighborhood.
This year, we are honored to have three keynote speakers, Prof. Lewis Lancaster, Prof. Halina Gottlieb, and Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang with us!

Lewis Lancaster
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
Founding Director, ECAI (Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative)
Keynote Title: “Preserving the Narrative”
Professor Lewis Lancaster is a co-founder of Pacific Neighborhood Consortium. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley for 33 years. He held the D.H. Chen Distinguished Professor in Buddhist Studies chair and is now Professor Emeritus.  In 1991, he helped to form the program for the University of the West, started at Hsilai Temple in Los Angeles and he is still an adjunct Professor.  In 2006 he was appointed President of the University. He founded the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) at Berkeley and remains its Director. The most recent research project, an Atlas of Maritime Buddhism, has become the basis for a major exhibition at Buddha Museum at Fo Guang Shan and will also open as an exhibit at City University of Hong Kong.

Halina Gottlieb
CEO, Digital Heritage Center Sweden
Founding Director, NODEM (Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums)
Keynote Title: “Designing for a Sustainable Future in Digital Heritage”
Halina Gottlieb is a facilitator, co-ordinator and mentor in academia, governmental agencies, visitor centers, research & development programs, and research clusters for innovation of digital heritage and modernization of higher education. Her research focus is on development and evaluation of digital artifacts and methods, tools and course modules supporting interdisciplinary and inter-sectorial programs.
Halina obtained a PhD in digital heritage and design research with the dissertation Designing Engagement for Art – Exploring Interfaces and Interpretive Content of Digital Heritage Artifacts in Museum Environments at the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute University College Dublin, Ireland and Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, Sweden.
She had been affiliated (1999-2020) at the Interactive Institute Swedish ICT Stockholm, the Executive Committee of EPOCH (European Network of Excellence in Cultural Heritage), the European  Network of Expertise Centers, NODEM (Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums) conference series, DIHA – an interdisciplinary research cluster at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and the Nordic Knowledge Triangle Program at the Nordic Council of Ministers and has been managing director of Digital Heritage Center Sweden.

Audrey Tang
Digital Minister, Executive Yuan, Taiwan
Keynote Title: “Digital Social Innovation”
Audrey Tang is Taiwan’s digital minister in charge of Social Innovation.
Audrey is known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin.
In the public sector, Audrey served on Taiwan national development council’s open data committee and the 12-year basic education curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project.
In the private sector, Audrey worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.
In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government.”

We look forward for your participation.
Thank you for your continued support!
Best regards,

Betty & Joanna
PNC Secretariat
Tel: +886-2-2652-1885#313
+886-2-2652-1885#309
Fax: +886-2-2652-1882
E-mail: pnc@sinica.edu.tw
Address:P.O. Box 1-76 Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan
Website: https://www.pnclink.org

The Sloan Foundation technology program is sponsoring a scholarship fund to enable participation in OSPOCon by faculty, staff, students, and/or administrators actively engaged with or interested in learning more about Open Source Program Offices in Academic/Research institutions. Anyone working at an academic institution is eligible – there’s a cap of 2 scholarships per institution so interested applicants are encouraged to apply soon; the submission deadline is September 7th. As I understand it, you can register to attend either virtually or in person; there are separate programs that Sloan is offering to support registration and travel.

Scholarships & travel funding are available for the event in Seattle in late September, see

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/ospocon/attend/scholarships/

and also a London based event in October , see

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/ospocon-europe/attend/scholarships/

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

We’ve received a number of inquiries regarding our fall meeting so I wanted to share with you what we’re currently thinking so you can plan accordingly; we expect to share more details in mid-September. Our hope is to hold an in-person gathering in Washington, DC this December, but of course uncertainties abound, as those of you in the process of starting a fall term at your institutions well know.

For the Fall 2021 Membership Meeting, at this time, we expect to hold BOTH a virtual meeting and an in-person event, each independently of one another, and designed to complement each other:

• The virtual meeting will take place during the afternoons, Eastern time, on Dec. 6-9. It will include the Executive Roundtable (Dec. 6 and, if necessary, Dec. 9), selected plenary, panel, and project briefing sessions (mostly on Dec. 7 and Dec. 8), and pre-recorded presentations. I think we can safely say this meeting will take place as planned.
• The current plan is to hold the in-person meeting the following week, on Dec. 13-14, at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, DC, as originally scheduled. This event will be re-designed to maximize time for gathering and connecting, with longer breaks, fewer concurrent sessions than we’ve traditionally had at our in-person meetings, and organized discussion opportunities. Per usual, we’ll have a first-time-attendees welcome on the morning of the first day, and my opening plenary will begin around 1:00 PM Eastern. The meeting will adjourn on Dec. 14 around 3:30 PM Eastern. Our guess is that this meeting will have fewer attendees than a usual CNI fall member meeting for various reasons. We intend to record essentially all presentations from this meeting and make them rapidly available.
• Our contingency plan, if we cannot hold the in-person meeting Dec. 13-14, will be to move at least most of those sessions to a virtual meeting on Dec. 13-14, perhaps extending to December 15 if needed; these would take place during afternoon hours, Eastern time.

All member representatives will be invited to register for either or both the virtual or in-person meetings, and we will ask you to indicate your intention on the registration form for our planning purposes. We do understand, however, that plans can change, especially in the current environment.

Hopefully the rough outline shared here will help answer some of your basic questions about how we plan to proceed in December. Until then, please feel free to contact me (cliff@cni.org) or Diane Goldenberg-Hart (diane@cni.org) with any questions or concerns you may have. I hope to see many of you in the days and weeks ahead.

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director, CNI

In June 2021, CNI conducted its most recent Executive Roundtable exploring the status and plans for the research enterprise, particularly in light of developments in the pandemic. The report summarizing this discussion is now available, and I think it contains a good deal of useful information in how institutional strategies and priorities are evolving. You can find the report at

https://www.cni.org/go/future-research-enterprise-june-2021

I’d note that the report calls out a number of areas where CNI is seeking additional information, and we’d welcome hearing from additional organizations on these topics.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI