NFDIxCS Personas
Personas are often used in requirements engineering to analyse how people from target groups could use prospective systems or services [1]. In this article we want to take the reader with us on a journey to discover the stakeholders' needs and requirements in the vision of establishing the community development activities for the Computer Science (CS) consortia in the Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI).
This article is part of series of blogpost on community development activities within the NFDIxCS consortium. The activities that realized the importance of promoting the implementation of the FAIR data principles for CS research data and software artifacts, collaboration with other scientific disciplines and share the experience and knowledge with other NFDI consortia.
Persona is a focal point
The persona workshop was held in February 2024 as part of the activities during the third plenary meeting of NFDIxCS at the GWDG in Göttingen. The goal was to create personas representing future users and stakeholders of the Research Data and Software Management (RDSM). In the first part of this community development series, the field of stakeholders was explored together and placative positive and negative statements about RDSM from the perspective of the stakeholder were collected. As a starting point for this workshop, these positive and negative statements were clustered into broader topics, such as Reputation and Visibility, Cultural Change, Know-How, Controlling Use of Research Output, Support Structures, Impact, and Resources (Time and Money) [2].
Based on these clusters, a representative statement from each cluster was selected and used to develop a persona. The process of creating a persona involves developing an imaginary person who represents a member of the target group. This is supported by a predesigned questionnaire. The questionnaire helps to create an imaginary CV, design the look of the persona, and highlight the experiences with RDSM services. Specifically for the RDSM section, it was necessary to create two versions of the questionnaire: one for academics and another for non-academics, including policymakers, industry professionals, and members of society.
Personas are designed to explore the user context for services within the NFDIxCS community and for intersections with other communities. The resulting personas can be used for different tasks:
- Constructing and prioritizing requirements for activities, services, and architecture.
- Communicating decisions to stakeholders.
- Testing created activities from the perspective of the personas.
Persona Overview
In this workshop, nine personas were created in total: seven academic and two non-academic. Statistics show that most of the academic personas were holding a Ph.D. degree, with only one holding a bachelor 's degree. Of the two non-academic personas, one held a Ph.D. and the other a master's degree.
Person is a key for community development requirements
The process of collecting requirements for the NFDIxCS system follows a systematic approach. this process started with the identification of stakeholders, their priorities, and their roles as key users of the system. This is followed by generating requirements through the development of use cases and user stories, which serve as the foundation for defining system services and workflow features. This illustrates how traditional system engineering requirements can be transformed into a structured stream for planning, designing, and activating community development activities in a systematic manner.
This process guided to identification of requirements aimed at building an effective networking platform, a structured roadmap will be followed:
- Forming groups of activities based on community development needs.
- Extracting user stories and use cases from the personas questionnaire based on the formed activity groups.
- Defining acceptance criteria statements.
Conclusion
The process of creating personas is utilized to shape the stakeholders´ requirements and creating the infrastructure for research data and software management in the computer science consortia under the umbrella of NFDIxCS project. This process led to an action plan for establishing, building and empowering as well as assuring the quality of the community development activities vision.
In the following blogpost we will present this process in detail and present to the stakeholder analysis as a fundamental of community development. We will focus on there roles in the auction plan of the community development activities and special attention will be given to how the community development activities are designed.
References
[1] Bernoth, J., Al Laban, F., & Lucke, U. (2024). Utilizing Personas to Create Infrastructures for Research Data and Software Management. https://doi.org/10.18420/INF2024_180
[2] Al Laban, F., Bernoth, J., & Lucke, U. (2024). Creating Personas for NFDIxCS Project. In Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12593489