All,
This is a request for examples of community-managed cloud storage services where
“community-managed” means that the cost of the cloud storage service as well as
its usage is managed by an institution serving a (scientific community),
including very large communities such as earth sciences or smaller ones such as
numerical weather prediction, and
“cloud storage services” are commercial, highly available “pay-as-you-go”
services that provide safe and economic storage of large amounts of data and
allow global sharing of that data controlled by the party who pays, but
disappear as soon as payment for these services stop.
Today commercial cloud storage services are readily available and successfully
hide the many technical challenges of highly available long-term storage at
very attractive cost. Cloud storage also provides an excellent platform for
naming and sharing large (and small) datasets which is essential for
collaboration and reproducibility in data-intensive scientific disciplines. Yet
science communities are slow to adopt cloud storage. There are probably many
reasons for that but one that I repeatedly came across: the data stored in
cloud storage disappears when funding for the service runs out.
If the availability of a particular data set depends on a single community
member's availability of funding, the likelihood of loosing data can be quite
high and makes cloud storage too brittle for a reliable medium for scientific
data. A better approach might be to make the availability of all data sets
depend on the availability of funding within an entire community. Such an
arrangement would benefit that community by facilitating data sharing,
collaboration, and maintaining greater reproducibility of scientific results.
But community-funded cloud storage has all the management challenges of a
commons. For example, how should the storage space be governed? How much money
should the community spend on cloud storage? How is the money raised among the
members of the community? How do communities prevent The Tragedy of the Commons
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons>?
Please let me know of any examples you are aware of. Who is working on this? Do
examples exist with somewhat different definitions of "community-managed" or
"cloud storage services”?
Thanks,
Carlos
--
Carlos Maltzahn
Adjunct Professor
Computer Science Department
University of California, Santa Cruz
http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~carlosm/
