End Users

End-User Partners

A number of academic institutions participated in the project as end-user partners. They are:

• Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute, University of Southampton

• National Centre for e-Social Science, University of Manchester

• Welsh e-Science Centre, University of Cardiff

• Practice as Research in Performance, University of Bristol

• Centre for Excellence in Enquiry Based Learning, University of Manchester

• National e-Science Centre, University of Edinburgh

• The Freeman Centre, Universities of Sussex and Brighton

• The History of Political Discourse VRE, Universities of Hull and East Anglia

While the project has finished (since December 2006), we are always happy to hear from new users of the the software. If you would like to become and end-user partner in a possible future Memetic project, please contact us.

Pictures from the first Memetic workshop (15th April 2005), at the University of Manchester.

Pictures from the second Memetic workshop (6th May 2005), over the Access Grid.

Outputs

The Memetic project had the following outputs in relation to the end users:

• End User Requirements Report
• End User Briefing Materials - please note that this is now out of date
• End User Evaluation

Conclusions

The end-user evaluation incorporated both ethnographic observation by an expert in this field and long-term engagement with users comprising an approach known as co-realisation, which conceptualises design as a co-operative process where end-users and developers are equal partners. There is more detail on this subject in our final end-user evaluation document.

On the whole, this methodology was successful in that it resulted in robust software that has been found to be beneficial to many users. In future projects, we believe it would be useful to extend these concepts to involve an even closer, more formalised, relationship with users, for example, by addressing the issues of enfranchisement, so that end users can more clearly see what benefits accrue from being involved in the development process; hypothecation, whereby some project funds are set aside to pay end user partners for their involvement (which is also more likely to ensure their commitment); and synergy, where end users see the benefit of Memetic for their own work on other projects and use it within what becomes a hybrid framework. We note that some of these issues have been addressed in the more formalised involvement of users in the framework for phase two of the VRE programme.