RAMIRI Symposium gets off to a great start in London!
July 20th, 2009 / 1 Comments » /

Over 100 delegates attended the first part of the RAMIRI Symposium in London at Imperial College from 15-17 July. More photos of the conference and the speakers' presentations will be added to the website soon...

I would like to make my compliments to the organizers of the London RAMIRI-Conference. The valuable presentations showed that there is already much useful information available on Research Infrastructures (RIs), in particular on those that can be seen as big central instruments, which require large investments and have a relatively long life cycle in technology and applications. It might be useful to investigate how this vast experience would apply to other types of RIs, e.g. RIs with a federative and non-hierarchical structure, like the high performance communication networks present in many countries and regions of the world, or RIs with assets that are basically immaterial like the contents of internationally dispersed data bases for information about wildlife. Some types of RIs, like the networks, seem to have a more disruptive pattern of technological innovation and new applications appear unpredictably and with a different pace in various scientific areas and geographies. This must have implications for their governance structure. It would be - for instance - a mistake to manage communication networks as one centralised international facility, and to overlook the benefits of a federative structure for innovation of technology and for the emergence of new patterns of use. In order to get at general principles and rules for RI governance which cover also other types of RIs, it might help to consider RIs less according to their material properties but to analyse RIs in more functional and economic terms. RIs might be described according to their federative or hierarchical characteristics, the various functions they perform, the material or immaterial character of their assets, their structure of ownership, their international spread, their investment needs, their economic life cycle, the dynamics of their technology, of their applications and their users. Frank van Iersel SURFnet, The Netherlands frank.vaniersel@xs4all.nl

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