Thanks for sharing
As the title of the NSF program makes clear, the research community thinks of cyberinfrastructure as something people essentially share. An article from last month’s Economist about the increased interest in “sharing” as an economic phenomenon seems to be part of the same movement, especially since it’s been stimulated by things that are directly related to cyberinfrastructure – the open source software movement and peer-to-peer technologies. As you’d expect given their audience, the Slashdot posting on this, which linked to Yale’s Yochai Benkler, a leading thinker in this area, and his newest paper on the subject, drew a significant number of responses.
I think one way to separate out the research community’s conception of cyberinfrastructure from the vendor’s conception, on which we posted earlier, is to ask “Who is sharing what with whom, and for what purpose?”
