Putting research communities in the driving seat of e-infrastructures
The European Commission has established various pan-European initiatives to develop e-infrastructures to support the work of European research communities. It has been a challenge for these initiatives to find effectiveways to engage with the communitiesin the process of developing the infrastructure services. Too often this engagement has been reduced to the existence of a forum where communities are supposed to give advice on the services being developed, which often has had little practical effect on the development of the actual services. On other occasions, e-infrastructures have been dominated by a limited number of stakeholders – which has sometimes lead to over-representation from a single community or institute. Consequently, although the services that were developed fitted the needs of that particular community or institute, it was subsequently hard to extend those services so as to be of benefit to other research communities with different requirements.
