Social science research on cyberinfrastructure has relied upon piecemeal, project-specific approaches to studying how social, technical, organizational and cultural features intertwine. The proposed project will move CI studies to the next level toward large-scale, integrative approaches that will create comparable, reusable datasets across a range of research areas, collaboration methods, project scales, and project goals. The outcomes of the proposed work are (1) to produce fundamental social science about infrastructure development for virtual organizations and for data; (2) to create a functioning virtual organization with a specific set of goals to study data practice and data policy; and (3) to identify methods for formative evaluation of CI efforts on data, data analysis, and visualization that will be enriched by continual comparisons between projects. The long-term goal is to establish a CI Virtual Observatory for the study of data, data analysis, and visualization. Toward that goal, the proposed one-year project will undertake the necessary background research to develop such a virtual organization, to identify the most effective models for a virtual organization, and to identify the research questions about data, data analysis, and visualization that must be addressed to construct a viable cyberinfrastructure. As a test bed, the project will focus on bringing together principal players of CI projects in the environmental and atmospheric sciences.
