This page is the draft of the proposal to send to JISC - Alun and Mustie, feel free to edit and expand or criticise. This is really urgent now, though!
Suggested Title: Access Management and Future Grid Useres: overcoming the tech barrier
Introduction
We propose a study involving the interviewing of scientific and humanities researchers who are potential, incipient and established grid users. Firstly, by observation, we wish to establish whether any existing or future (yet to be developed) grid resource or service would benefit them intheir research; this may be to enable their current style of working ot be easier or quicker, or it may be to enable greater collaboration or inderdisciplinary working.
For those uses who are either currently working with grids or who agree that future use of the grid may be beneficial, we would like to explore further to examine the following hypotheses:
If a grid interface or the working environment is (apparently) too difficult to use, will it be adopted by the rightful users?
Most scientists and humanities researchers will be Service End Users (as defined in...xxxx).
2b. Currently grids are serving power users (as defined in...xxxx) and do not yet benefit non-computer-technical researchers.
[xxxx can probably reference the AllHandsPapers2006 that have just been accepted]
We also intend to examine the categorisation of users, as proposed by the ESP-GRID project, into the following groupings.
TO BE CONTINUED...