Form a bridge between toolmakers and tool-users.

My group at CSC acts as a bridge between supercomputers, databases, and scientific software, and the researchers at universities and research laboratories. I believe a central part of this bridge is people, not technology. During the last year I have recruited four new experts to my group, all with Ph.D's, and their background is in various fields: computational chemistry, biochemistry/bioinformatics, drug discovery, and computer science. Our job is to help researchers to reach their goals.

Help scientists to use online tools effectively.

When you have skilled people with multidisciplinary skills, you can provide consultation, courses, guides, manuals, tutorial articles, lectures, visits to laboratories, and joint research work.

Identify a network of experts for answering inquiries.

In addition to our experts, we use our contacts in the universities and research institutes for solving problems. In a few key areas we run active expert networks: bioinformatics, DNA microarray analysis, physics, etc.

Lead focus groups to determine needs.

This partially overlaps with the network of experts idea. We also make surveys and more informal polls to find areas for improvement. One good forum for feedback are our courses (about 40 annually), which also help us to improve our services by observing researchers in action.

Investigate web-based approaches for collaboration.

Were are developing extranet-style solutions, as well forming discussion forums. Currently we are providing web-bases applications in a few key areas. We also provide software licenses for desktop machines from our license server. For the heaviest users, our Unix supercomputing environment is the most powerful in Nordic countries. But for the collaboration to work, you have to have personal contacts also.

A quote from the article:

In a strict sense, only individuals create knowledge. The authors postulate two forms of knowledge, and converting between the two forms often leads to the creation of new knowledge. The first form, explicit knowledge, can be expressed in words and numbers, can be easily communicated and shared in the form of data, codified procedures or universal principles. This is the hard knowledge that we store in databases. Tacit knowledge is highly personal and hard to formalize. Subjective insights, intuitions and hunches fall into this category. This is the soft knowledge that we store in our heads. It is the knowledge of people, of personal observation.

Trusted computing might be a useful component in end-to-end secrecy. [...] But I don't think it will be a tool for helping the public to keep its private data private from the IRS or hospital administrators, since that supposes that the public can convince the IRS or hospital administrators to accept information in crypto wrappers that favor the public. All the people against whom I would like to protect my private data are people whom I can't compel to accept my data in my privacy wrapper. If I was in a position of power over those people, I wouldn't need trusted computing!

Moreover, the anti-competitive aspects of trusted computing must be stressed. Trusted computing can be used as a tool to eliminate unauthorized interoperability: in English, that means that trusted computing can be used by, say, your the company that sold you your word-processor to ensure that you can't open your own documents with their competitors' products.