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Getting executive buy-in: the value of technology demonstrators

Martie van Deventer, CSIR & Heila Pienaar, University of Pretoria 

Doing a quick search on Wikipedia very soon points out that technology demonstrators are generally associated with warfare, very expensive equipment and risk of loss of life.  We believe however, that demonstrators are also very useful when librarians have to do battle with executives to find appropriate funding for projects based on new Web 2.0 technologies.  In this paper we intend to show how we made use of the technology demonstrator strategy to build an integrated, light weight, virtual research environment (VRE) and convince executives that they need to support the initiative and assist in finding sufficient funding to get a full scale pilot project up and running. 

We will briefly explain the theory behind VREs and the research we did prior to building the demonstrator.  We’ll then show how we made use of Web 2.0 services to create a working VRE for researchers in malaria.  (The researchers are based at a variety of organisations.  Issues such as access, authentication and authorisation as well as IP protection had to be kept in mind.  Other issues that had to be considered were the researchers’ workflow, ‘ease of use’ and the ultimately the curation of their intellectual output.) 

Finally we’ll share progress to date and explain the role the demonstrator played in convincing executives to take on accountability for the project.  The continued role of the library and its information scientists will be provided in some detail. 

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