Appendix A
Federation Models
Several individuals were invited to summarize examples of successful federation models. The examples selected are from a spectrum of organizations, including libraries, international organizations, industry, government, and academia. The examples of federation models appear as written by the authors, with minor editing for continuity of style.
Association Of Research Libraries Federation
Prudence Adler
Since there is no one model in the academic arena that will serve as the basis for designing an EOSDIS Federation, the following elements or factors culled from other federations, could be incorporated into a new model to best serve the needs of the evolving organization. Issues relating to identification of community values, investments in long-term preservation and access activities, and better definition of the relationship between the federation, NASA, and Congress will be important to delineate and will be central to the success of the federation.
- The federation model should allow the organization to evolve and change, in large part, to be responsive to changing user information needs. One key element of the model will be to ensure that the organization is responsive to membership—a membership comprised of multiple constituencies. It will be a formidable task to design a federation that is equally responsive to changing scientific requirements while meeting congressional demands.
- A common theme or glue in existing academic consortia is the set of values that the community brings to the effort. These shared values provide cohesiveness to potentially diverse communities. For example, one value for the federation relates to information policies such as the policy supporting the full and open exchange of data. Other motivations to consider include economic concerns and the need to improve a local situation through national initiatives.
-
-
*
Understanding common values also assists the organization in managing and/or considering other relationships. The increasingly complex environment in which EOSDIS partners will operate suggests that a common set of principles would enhance the federation's ability to achieve its goals and collaborate with other initiatives.
-
*
Articulating values permits the federation to draw in other partners, initiate other activities, and export its values set to other efforts that may complement or extend beyond its current operating structure.
-
*
Partners in the federation should do an "environmental scan" to identify and understand potentially competing values or projects that could keep a partner from fully embracing an EOS-centric set of values or principles. For example, the very nature of this enterprise is international. How will the federation interact with international centers and users? Some of these relationships will be appropriately governed by U.S. data policies and practices; others are not so well defined.
-
-
- There is a need for careful definition of the relationship between the federation and NASA. EOS partners are legitimately seeking greater clarity in this relationship. As this relationship evolves, it will be important to be aware of how NASA will present this program to Capitol Hill, how the federation funding process will evolve, and how the appropriate committees (e.g., appropriations and authorization) will view NASA's relationship to the federation.
- Members of the research and education communities require access to both current and historical data. The federation should address issues relating to long-term preservation, access activities, and how the users will be able to integrate and use EOS data with other information resources located elsewhere.
Most academic federations and organizations include several common governance structures: full-time staff, a clearly articulated mission, a Board of Directors, an Executive Committee that can respond quickly to ongoing management issues, plus committees to advance the work of the membership. The EOSDIS Federation may need comparable organizational structures.
In addition, an appreciation of the benefits to members and, in particular, how collective action and collaboration advances the interest of the community are critically important to the success of an organization. Other key factors include: a well defined issue set, the ability of the governance structure (board and members) to respond quickly and with flexibility to issues, and the active engagement of members. A brief review of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) organization is illustrative of these elements found in other academic federations and organizations.
Association Of Research Libraries Federation
|
GOVERNANCE |
OBJECTIVES |
||||||||||||||||
|
Full time executive director;
|
Mission statement: The mission of the ARL is to shape and influence forces affecting the future of research libraries in the process of scholarly communication. ARL programs and services promote equitable access to and effective use of recorded knowledge in support of teaching, research, scholarship, and community service. The association articulates the concerns of research libraries and their institutions, forges coalitions, influences information policy development, and supports innovation and improvement in research library operations. ARL is a not-for-profit membership organization comprising the libraries of North American research institutions and operates as a forum for the exchange of ideas and as an agent for collective action. |
||||||||||||||||
|
|
Membership in ARL is institutional. There are currently 121 members that meet twice a year. |
||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
COST/BENEFITS |
LESSONS LEARNED AND OUTSTANDING CHARACTERISTICS |
||||||
|
Cost to individual members
|
|
||||||
|
Benefits to to individual members
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
Harvard Libraries
Thomas M. Parris
Surprising as it may seem there is no single "Harvard Library System." Rather Harvard operates more than 90 autonomous libraries. Each has it own endowment, reports to its own dean or department chair, and so forth. However, these libraries have federated so that in many respects they look like a single system to the outside world. There were three compelling reasons for this federation. The first was driven by patron demand. Our research community became vociferous in its disdain for having to search the many card catalogs maintained across a large campus. This was particularly true for the growing number of student and faculty performing interdisciplinary research. Second, the individual libraries were facing a common set of expensive decisions relating to the construction of computerized card catalog systems, preservation laboratories, and off-site depositories. Each of these efforts have significant economies of scale. Third, rapidly rising monograph and serial prices forced libraries to collaborate more closely on purchases. We could no longer afford to have multiple libraries buying the same expensive materials.
The structure of the Harvard library federation allows the individual libraries to maintain complete control over collection policies, finances, and all aspects of internal operations. Money flows from these autonomous libraries to support unifying services, such as online catalog, depository, and preservation. There is no mandate that forces libraries to subscribe to these services. Indeed, some libraries do not participate in the campus-wide card catalog system (HOLLIS), and some maintain their own preservation and off-site storage facilities. The executive committees of the federation are dominated by representatives from member libraries and are structured with some bias toward the smaller libraries.
The result is impressive. As a group, the Harvard libraries are the largest academic library in the world. The online card catalog has over 8 million bibliographic entries. The Harvard Depository, our centralized service for off-site storage, has attracted significant business from other local libraries and businesses.
Harvard University Library Federation
|
GOVERNANCE |
OBJECTIVES |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
COST/BENEFITS |
LESSONS LEARNED |
|
|
|
NATO's Partnership for Peace
Charles J. Dale
In 1994 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established the Partnership for Peace (PfP) as a vehicle for developing bilateral security relationships between the alliance (and its sixteen member states) and the non-member nations of Europe and Central Asia. Twenty-seven non-NATO nations, with such diverse strategic interests as Switzerland and Russia, have now established unique, bilateral partner-ships with the alliance. The Partnership Work Programme from which each individual partnership is derived includes over 1,000 activities annually, activities such as workshops, technical exchanges, exercises, consultations, and training courses. The partnership covered a broad range of security issues from military exercises in peacekeeping to the democratic control of armed forces.
PfP is established within the federal structure of the Alliance itself. Within NATO, the sixteen member states hold power and the ''center," the secretary general and his staff, govern by their consent. NATO's members have shared interests and values and are treaty bound to come to each other's defense. NATO decides by consensus—one nation, one vote—at all levels. The voice of the United States is no more, or greater, than that of the Netherlands or Iceland. NATO has a common language and way of doing business (several thousand standardization agreements, for example) that define technical standards for interoperability of forces. The "work" of the alliance is guided by alliance foreign and defense ministers, who meet twice a year to provide strategic direction. The North Atlantic Council, the highest standing political body of the alliance in which ambassadors represent their nations, meets at least weekly to oversee and direct the everyday work of the alliance. "Corporate NATO" is comprised of several hundred committees, agencies, and working groups—the profit centers of the alliance—each with an independent mandate and authority from the center.
The partnership draws on the strength of NATO's federalism. Partner nations are fully enfranchised within the context of their bilateral relationship with the alliance. The work of the partnership is decentralized through the NATO structure. Partners have dual citizenship, as sovereign nations and as members of the partnership. They share interests and common values and are committed, in both a collective and individual sense, to common objectives. The partnership has its own political framework, instruments and procedures, in most cases modeled after NATO's.
But the NATO PfP marriage is not perfect; in fact, it has a fundamental tension built in. Partnership is not membership. The sixteen alliance members retain significant reserve powers to decide the strategic direction of PfP. Partners have a voice, but no vote. This built-in tension is causing fault lines within the partnership as partners call for more say on "important" issues affecting the partnership writ large.
Nato's Partnership for Peace Federation
|
GOVERNANCE |
OBJECTIVES |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
COST/BENEFITS |
LESSONS LEARNED/TENSIONS AND OUTSTANDING CHARACTERISTICS |
||||
|
Cost to individual members:
Benefits to individual partner nations:
Benefits to NATO and partner nations at large:
|
|
Strategic Research at Chevron Petroleum Technology Company
Robert Heming
Chevron Petroleum Technology Company is charged with bringing the best available technology to Chevron's upstream (exploration and production) business. The company covers a wide range of technical expertise and deals with a very geographically dispersed customer base.
In 1992 we radically redesigned our approach to providing technology and, in particular, we changed the way we gain access to new science and technology. It was felt that our previous efforts to find new and radical technologies of potential value to our business were badly flawed. We needed a rethink.
The results of that rethink is something we call strategic research. Its objective is to scan the technology horizon for new science, much of it not traditionally used in the oil and gas business, which has the potential to change the way we do our business or reveal new business opportunities. By calling it strategic research and by giving the responsibility to one individual we believe we have made it a strong and focused part of our overall technology strategy.
That strategy can be depicted by a broad arrow running from high-risk but low-cost and highly leveraged technology investments to relatively low-risk, high-cost investments that are designed to take products and services to the customer. The stages along the way are called tiers and the continuum can be viewed as a pipeline with a wide opening at the strategic research end where we invest relatively small amounts in several new science and technology ventures. Successful technologies are then developed and matured to the point where they can replace existing technology.
As well as stretching our "technology horizon," we also decided that to be successful our approach to collaboration must be different. We wished to be regarded as good partners by a wide range of groups within the invention community, from national laboratories and research institutes through universities and small entrepreneurs to other industrial R&D companies.
To accomplish this we designated the role of linker. Someone who could be "at home" within our research group as well as a research group in a university for instance. To us "at home" means being accepted as a co-worker and colleague and not being viewed as an interloper.
To achieve this we practice certain key principles. The first is to be explicit and clear about what success looks like in each organization. Next we develop a collaboration that will allow both parties to succeed. The real objective is to allow both partners to achieve success, or win, as defined by their respective cultural and business models. For example, when collaborating with a university, it is important to recognize that ownership of the invention and publication rights are vital to the mission of a university. In setting up a research collaboration we try very hard to match the cultural and business objectives.
The final key is to be very clear about the role of the linker and the personal attributes necessary for that role to be successful. Then management must reinforce the principles and behaviors needed. It must support, coach, provide vision, and encourage both creativity and collaborative behavior.
Our experience since 1993, when we made our first strategic research investment, has been positive, but we have learned several hard lessons, too. Do not underestimate the importance of the linker—a good one makes all the difference. Do not underestimate the importance of cultural and business differences. A natural tendency of technical people is to focus first on the technical issues and last on the cultural or so-called soft issues. In our experience it is the soft issues that cause hard falls. Be prepared to relocate people to an appropriate common work site. Stretching the physical boundaries of one's organization does wonders to people's views of issues, problems, solutions, etc. We see great strength in creating a much more virtual organization to accomplish our strategic research goals.
We are pleased with what we have achieved, but we realize that we need to learn much more. Above all, we have learned the importance of clarity. Clarity of vision, objectives, intents, success factors, and so on. Get everything on the table right at the beginning. Anything left under the table is a potential show stopper at some future date, so take time in the early stages to understand your potential partner and understand what is motivating that person to collaborate with you.
Communicate and communicate as much as you can, but always be clear and explicit about where you want to go and how you want to get there.
Chevron Petroleum Technology Company Strategic Research
|
GOVERNANCE |
OBJECTIVES |
|
|
To participate in and fund research and development into new science and technology that can substantially improve the performance of our upstream oil and gas business or provide new business opportunities. |
|
PRINCIPLES/BENEFITS |
LESSONS LEARNED |
Benefits to Chevron:
Benefits to Collaborator:
|
|
The Science Of Federalism: Past And Present
Joanne I. Gabrynowicz
In 1987 the United States began a third century of government under its present Constitution: a constitution that has successfully brought an energetic nation through the passage of time, the expansion of physical space, and national crises. This presentation suggests that the framers of the United States Constitution engaged in what they called "a science of constitutions," which employed the scientific method; a geometric model; measurements and proportions; Newtonian physics; and, what is today recognized as systems science. It addresses the goal of the Constitution framers, the science they used, their design process, and the resulting system.
It is suggested further that the use of a similar approach in modem times can provide a model for a federated data and information acquisition, processing, and distribution system that transcends local limitations and centralized control, if it is founded on general principles that have a more universal applicability.
United States Federation
|
GOVERNANCE |
OBJECTIVES |
|
|
|
|
RESULTS OF COLLABORATION |
LESSONS LEARNED |
|
|
|
University Corporation For Atmospheric Research Federation
Frank Eden
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) mission is "to support, enhance, and extend the capabilities of the university community nationally and internationally; to understand the behavior of the atmosphere and related systems and the global environment; and to foster the transfer of knowledge and technology for the betterment of life on Earth." UCAR was incorporated in the late 1960s and is now a consortium of 63 universities.
This mission has evolved into the management of a variety of major facilities and projects broadly related to the atmospheric sciences. The first and most visible of these is the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). UCAR also manages large distributed data systems, including Unidata, which provides meteorological data and networking to well over 100 researcher and user institutions, and the Distributed Active Archive Center, which similarly provides ocean data services. UCAR initiated the Global Positioning System Meteorology Instrument program. UCAR sponsors extensive educational activities and provides for commercial and technological transfer activities.
UCAR has a strong central management system with a full-time president and staff and an elected Board of Trustees. Its relationship to its principal sponsor, NSF, has changed from contractual to a cooperative agreement system, which stipulates direct NSF-led review of programs and management.
UCAR has clearly operated successfully for over 30 years. It has managed and provided major facilities and an institutional voice and focus for the atmospheric sciences community. It appears to have successfully managed a triad of a major center, university members, and federal agencies. On the downside there have been failures (e.g., losing the management of the National Scientific Balloon Facility and withdrawing from the Institute for Naval Oceanography). The growth of UCAR activities has strained the board's oversight. There has always existed a tension between individual investigators and UCAR over the division of NSF funds between them as a zero sum game and the potential opportunity loss for individual universities to own and operate major facilities. There have also been issues of UCAR programs competing with the private sector.
University Corporation For Atmospheric Research Federation
|
GOVERNANCE |
OBJECTIVES |
||||
|
|
Mission statement defines broad strategy. Specifics include:
|
|
COST/BENEFITS |
LESSONS LEARNED/ISSUES AND OUTSTANDING CHARACTERISTICS |
||||
|
Cost to individual members:
Benefits to individual members:
Benefits to atmospheric science community at large (non-members):
|
Outstanding Characteristics
|
