EOSC Nordic Climate demonstrator: Personas and Pathways

Personas and Pathways

The personas and pathways described below have been presented to students, researchers and climate scientists to get feedback and inputs for designing real use cases.

Odin

Odin is an established scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. He is in his fifties and endeavors to get people thinking about sustainable lifestyle. He follows the flight shaming environmental movement, owns an electric car and lives in a passive house. He has been involved in the successive CMIPs and has practical experience with handling climate data. He loves teaching and working with master students and young researchers and has no issues with sharing as long as he can see a benefit in the process.

Odin pathway

Discovery

Odin is not directly involved in EOSC-Nordic but is of course aware of this project. He has no plan to engage with EOSC-Nordic because he does not expect anything useful for him and his team.

First Contact

He organized in October 2019 an intensive course on eScience for linking Arctic measurements and modeling for the Nordics (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark). For this course, a Jupyterhub was set up on the NIRD toolkit with access to all CMIP5 and 6 data as well as a wealth of observations (field campaigns) provided by several participants (and copied on NIRD for easy access). For the first time, all the participants focused on the scientific questions rather than trying to sort out technical issues: data transfer, data access and data sharing, code sharing, knowledge transfer (modelers, observers, etc.).

Participation

Following up on this successful experience, several participants asked Odin to make this e-insfrastructure available to be able to work cross-borders and in the same way. EOSC-Nordic seems to be the right place to ask for such thing.

Sustained Participation

Odin uses the NIRD-toolkit based Jupyterhub on a regular basis. He identifies several weaknesses such as difficulties to trace data ownership and license (especially for observations) and correctly cite the source of the data, lack of data catalogue. He also would like to get more computing resources to process more and faster data. He understands that he needs some training and documentation to realize the full potential of GPUs and distributed data processing.

Networked Participation

Odin and several participants of the eScience course wish to expand this e-infrastructure further and would like their colleagues and collaborators in the Nordics to use it as well. This tool is now an integral part of their working toolkit.

Leadership

Odin is willing to set up similar e-infrastructure for several of his projects and also wish to organize another eScience course in 2020. He believes that issues he raises can be addressed and resolved with little involvement from his side.

Freya

Freya is an ambitious young associate professor at Stockholm University. She got her PhD 10 years ago on aerosol optical properties and still works on aerosol scattering properties. She travels a lot to participate in various field campaigns and supervises as many master students/PhDs/postdocs as possible to expand her publication list. Freya took an intro Data Management course long ago, as a PhD student, and has some exposure to and interest to Open Science, but is hesitant to share her data for fear of being “scooped” on an important discovery. Funders and publishers are now demanding to publish software and data along with her paper and she sees it as an additional burden without any benefit for her.

Freya pathway

Discovery

Freya knows about EOSC-Nordic and wanted to be associated with it from the very beginning. However, she has very little time to invest on this project herself.

First Contact

Freya sent Ada one of her PhD student to the eScience course organized by Odin. Freya was very impressed by the high quality of the multi-colored graphs Ada was now able to produce and by how quickly she could process and visualize her data. Freya grasps immediately the full benefit of the training Ada has received: she will be able to ask Ada to produce high quality plots with minimal iterations.

Participation

Freya’s group does not have access to a jupyterhub with access to all her data (stored locally on different disks) and she has no clue about who can set it up for her group and how much it would cost. EOSC-Nordic can provide advice and most likely services that are directly usable for her group.

Sustained Participation

Freya has money on her projects and would be willing to contribute financially to reserve and access resources and storage for her group and collaborators. She is indeed concerned about loosing ownership over her data (collected during field campaigns) and would like to restrain access to unpublished data to her group as well as national and Nordic collaborators. Once published on highly ranked journals, she would not mind making her data public providing she is rightfully referenced and cited and as long as the process does not require much time and effort.

Networked Participation

Freya is happy to recommend the use of EOSC-Nordic services to her close collaborators so that they can better perform and more quickly publish. She will also make sure that all her students (master, PhDs) and Postdocs get appropriate training for the usage of EOSC-Nordic services. She will not hesitate to show off plots and results obtained via EOSC-Nordic services and mention her involvement if it can be seen as a success.

Leadership

In the first stage of the project, she will take full advantage for her own benefit but she would happily take on a more leading role if that can increase her credentials and get additional funding/projects.

Vellamo

Vellamo is a first year PhD student at Helsinki University. She has a very good scientific background and sound technical skills: she took an advanced course on Python programming and attended last summer a one week Summer School on “Open Science in Practice”. Her PhD involves comparisons between climate model outputs and actual measurements. Her supervisor gave her a dozen of scientific papers to read and she is now in a exploratory phase.

Vellamo pathway

Discovery

Vellamo has never heard about EOSC-Nordic. She is technically very independent but she is limited in terms of computational resources and storage; she is frustrated because she spends a lot of time for searching, transferring and analyzing data while she knows tools exist to facilitate her work. However, her supervisor has no clue about how to help her.

First Contact

She knows all the relevant keywords and found information on the EOSC-Nordic website and would like to become an EOSC-Nordic champion and bring EOSC-Nordic services and other activities to her organization. However, she is too shy to make contact directly with EOSC-Nordic.

Participation

She is attending her first conference to present her work. During this conference, EOSC-Nordic organizes a training workshop to present EOSC-Nordic services. She is one of the first to register and has the opportunity to mingle with EOSC-Nordic representatives.

Sustained Participation

EOSC-Nordic grants Vellamo access to EOSC-Nordic Virtual Laboratories (Galaxy portal with Plutof and other interactive environment services such as jupyterhub). It speeds up her work and she could contribute with testing, reporting bugs and issues in order to improve training material and services. She will be an asset for the project because she will be the prime beneficiary.

Networked Participation

Vellamo could easily become an EOSC-Nordic service ambassador provided her involvement and contribution are recognized and visible.

Leadership

She could become an “official” EOSC-Nordic champion and bring best practices to her organization and advertise it to other students.