People Bite Back – Sociology of the Grid? I spent much of the day talking with people and catching up (if I am to study the 'social' side of Grids it seems important to be social), but did see a couple of things that hint at how Grids might be shaped by people. One was a set of presentations on use of Grids in health in Exchange room 1. Here, a speaker (I didn’t catch his name) stated that “Easily the biggest challenge is the human factor”. While we aspire to create sharing mediated by grids, people don’t like sharing. Pawel Plaszcza of GridwiseTech made a similar point later on, discussing why data cannot necessarily leave one hospital, because it was expensive to create, came from years of medical practice, people want credit for their work (and cannot control that once it leaves), and has legal constraints on its leaving the country. Data is clearly not just data devoid of context.

BEinGrid (or perhaps BeingRid?), at stand 15 are producing a set of case studies on the use of Grids in Business, one of which is about supporting online gaming. In their presentation this afternoon they pointed out that people play games when not at work, so server providers might share servers between business and gaming. Just as data is socially influenced, in some contexts, load on this grid is also shaped by the working practices of users. Just as the National Power Grid is influenced by the time of advert breaks in soap operas so Grid demand is shaped by the working practices of its users – if only because people don’t submit jobs at 2am as much as at 10am!

As a parting thought, on the train up here I read an article about NASA*. It is sobering to know that currently somewhere between 20% and 55% of NASA employees are about to retire - If the “space age” has grown old and been pensioned off – where next?

* Lee, Simmons & Drueen (2005) “Knowledge sharing in practice; applied storytelling and knowledge communities at NASA” Int, J of Knowledge and Learning 1(2).