I’ve been very quiet on the blog for the last few months. In part this is because I am preparing a detailed academic paper on Cloud Computing (details will follow in a month or so ) and in part because teaching and life bogged me down.

In any case you might like to see details of a grant I have just won with colleagues around the UK.  Creativity Greenhouse: SeRTES. My interest is in how value-networks emerge, and how we can better understand the networks of value and service which emerge through the increasing integration of companies through their development of distributed systems using architectures such as cloud computing.

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The SeRTES project aims to provide a set of requirements/specification of a visualisation to show scenarios, ‘the whole’ rather than ‘the parts’, how issues in a technological enabled society are dynamically related i.e. how entities, individuals, institutions, laws, and risks dynamically interact within the virtual realm. The research would also abstract key constructs (of entities, links and flows) for the visualisation that allow ‘non-obvious’ representation that is parsimonious and powerful. We will develop a skeletal representation and demonstrator that could have richness and layers added over time, beyond the current project scope. The project will also devise ways of extracting (queries), from the visualisation, ways it can be used, e.g. value risk, how to value stewardship, security, privacy, contingent values, trust and if there are useful inter-, intra-layer notions of ‘trust domain’ that can help us organize the architecture of the ecosystem to enable interactions, transactions, and ecosystem development. This queries would help support decisions, resulting in a tool that can be used by the policy makers, business leaders, and law enforcement officers to make intelligent decisions. The SeRTES project proposes to represent a ‘tool of tools’ that is truly trans-disciplinary and cross-cultural. Finally, the project sees its research as a seed-corn project and expects to seek more funding to add to the richness of the representation and develop a network of studies complementing this project.