The document discusses the myExperiment virtual research environment for sharing workflows. Some key points: 1. myExperiment is a social network and repository for research workflows and methods. It currently has over 1800 users and hundreds of shared workflows. 2. The site allows fine-grained privacy controls, grouping of related content into "packs", and integration with other systems through federation. 3. Analysis found that most workflows and other content are shared publicly, and some users actively build upon other users' shared workflows. The most viewed workflow has over 1500 views. 4. The principles behind myExperiment's design focus on empowering scientists by enabling new forms of collaboration and sharing without forcing changes to workflows. The

1. Where are we going
and how are we going
to get there?

2. ?

3. 1. GPS Technology
2. The Sony Walkman
3. The Bar code
4. TV Dinners
5. PlayStation
Top 10
'inventions' 6. Social Networking
that changed 7. Text messages
the world
8. Electronic Money
9. Microwaves
10. Trainers JISC Accredited
Trainers Scheme?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/4981964/Top-10-inventions-that-changed-the-world.html

5. linkeddata.org

6. Thanks to Carole Goble
Duncan’s Research Environment
LogBook
Images
Presentations
Software
Literature
Compute resource
His friends and colleagues
Backup and Archive
Data (files, spreadsheets)

7. “There are these great
collaboration tools that 12-
year-olds are using. It’s all
back to front.”
Robert Stevens

8. Virtual Learning
The social process Environment
Undergraduate
Students
of Science 2.0
1.0
Next Generation
Researchers
Digital
Libraries scientists
Graduate
Students
Reprints
Peer-
Reviewed Technical
experimentation
Journal &
Conference Preprints Reports
Papers &
Metadata
Local
Web Data, Metadata,
Repositories Provenance, Scripts,
Certified
Experimental Workflows, Services,
Results & Analyses Ontologies, Blogs, ...
Thanks to Simon Coles

9. My Seven Rs
We want research to be:
•Replayable – go back and see what happened
•Repeatable – run the experiment again
•Reproducible – new expt to reproduce results
•Reusable – use as part of new experiments
•Repurposeable – reuse the pieces in new expt
•Replicatable – for scale and automation
•Reliable – systematic, unbiased and robust

10. How do we move from heroic scientists doing
heroic science with heroic infrastructure to
everyday scientists doing science they couldn’t
do before? humanists research
archaeologists
geographers
musicologists
...
researchers! It’s the
democratisati
on of e-
Science! 

11. “A biologist would rather share their
toothbrush than their gene name”
Mike Ashburner and others
Professor Genetics,
University of Cambridge, UK
“Data mining: my data’s mine and your
data’s mine”
Thanks to Carole Goble

12. You’re
letting
the
No
pedestrians
oiks
in!

13. You’re
letting
the
No
muggles
muggles
in!

15. The experiment that is
Web 2
Social
Network Open
Repositories
Researchers

16. Not Facebook for scientists!
mySpace

17.  “Facebook for Scientists”  Open source (BSD) Ruby
...but different to Facebook! on Rails application with
 A repository of research HTML, REST and SPARQL
methods (an SGDL?) interfaces
 A community social network  Project started March 2007
of people and things  Closed beta July 2007
 A Social Virtual Research
Environment  Open beta November 2007
myExperiment currently has 1800 registered users, 150 groups,
700 workflows, 200 files and 60 packs.
Go to www.myexperiment.org to access publicly available
content or create an account.

18. myExperiment Features
 User Profiles
 Groups
 Friends
 Sharing
 Tags
 Workflows
 Developer interface
 Credits and Attributions
Distinctives
 Fine control over privacy
 Packs
 Federation
 Enactment

19. • Of the 661 workflows, 531 are publicly visible whereas 502
are publicly downloadable.
• 3% of the workflows with restricted access are entirely
private to the contributor and for the remaining they
elected to share with individual users and groups.
Scientists do share! 
• 69 workflows (over 10%) have been shared, with the
owner granting edit permissions to> Producers and
Consumers > Curators specific users
C
groups.
• In addition there are 52 instances where users have noted
that a workflow is based on another workflow on the site.
• The most viewed workflow has 1566 views.
• There are 50 packs, ranging from tutorial examples to
bundles of materials relating to specific experiments.

21. Six Principles of Software Design to Empower Scientists
1. Fit in, Don’t Force Change 1. Keep your Friends Close
2. Jam today and more jam 2. Embed
tomorrow 3. Keep Sight of the Bigger
3. Just in Time and Just Picture
Enough 4. Favours will be in your
Favour
4. Act Local, think Global
5. Know your users
5. Enable Users to Add Value
6. Expect and Anticipate
6. Design for Network Effects Change
De Roure, D. and Goble, C. "Software Design for Empowering Scientists,"
IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 88-95, January/February 2009

22. When proj ectsHarmful?
Computer Scientists Considered
g o
bad... mentality
• “Build it and they will come”
– Second guessing requirements then going away and building
well engineered solutions to problems people didn’t know
they had and perhaps never will
• Focusing on software not content
• Assumption of benign environment and success as the
norm (NB excludes security experts)
• Prioritising the generic over the specific
• Always coming up with a complicated solution (because
they want to write a paper about it)
• “Using jargon and being like totally patronising”
• “What did they ever do that was useful anyway?”

23. Things we never want to hear
• “Don’t worry about how to get those components
working together, just use <buzzword > to fix that!”
• “If you stop and think about how it works for a second,
it makes complete sense!”
• “Well, they should read the fantastic manual!”
• “We don’t need to do any user testing. I’m a user and
it works fine for me!”
• “Why would you want to do that, in that way?”
• “Why aren’t you doing that in the same way as them?”
• “Remind me to lend you a copy of the Mythical Man
Month”
• “How can our users be so stupid? It’s so obvious!”
Thanks to Neil Chue Hong

24. Don’t think rollout of technologies...
Mass
Use by
Researchers
Think roll-in of users...
Mass
Use by
Researchers
Knowledge co-production vs Service Delivery!

25. Where are we going and how are
we going to get there?
We’ve succeeded when people
can routinely do things they
want to do that they couldn’t do
before, resulting in new learning
and research*
“Can I have a copy of your
research object please?”
Go on the journey with your
“Computer says yes!”
users and empower them.
* Make sure you can measure this

26. Contact
David De Roure
dder@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Carole Goble
carole.goble@manchester.ac.uk
See wiki.myexperiment.org
Thanks
Simon Coles, Duncan Hull, Neil Chue Hong,
myExperiment team

27. References
De Roure, D., Goble, C. and Stevens, R. (2009) The Design and
Realisation of the myExperiment Virtual Research Environment for
Social Sharing of Workflows. Future Generation Computer Systems
25, pp. 561-567. doi:10.1016/j.future.2008.06.010
De Roure, D. and Goble, C. (2009) "Software Design for
Empowering Scientists," IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 88-95,
January/February 2009. doi:10.1109/MS.2009.22
Carole Goble and David De Roure (2008) Curating Scientific Web
Services and Workflows. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 5
(September/October 2008)
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/CuratingScie