Table Of ContentFastLane
JOHNS HOPKINS STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY
Merritt Roe Smith, Series Editor
F a s t L a n e
MANAGING SCIENCE IN THE
INTERNET WORLD
Thomas J. Misa + Jeffrey R. Yost
Johns Hopkins University Press |
BALTIMORE
© 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Misa, Thomas J.
FastLane : managing science in the Internet world / Thomas J.
Misa, Jeffrey R. Yost.
pages cm. — (Johns Hopkins studies in the history of technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-4214-1868-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — isbn 978-1-
4214-1869-8 (electronic) — isbn 1-4214-1868-1 (hardcover : alk. pa-
per) — isbn 1-4214-1869-X (electronic) 1. Science—Data processing.
2. Computers—History. 3. Internet in public administration. I. Yost,
Jeffrey R. II. Title. III. Title: FastLane. IV. Title: Managing science in
the Internet world.
q183.9.m57 2016
502.85—dc23
2015010637
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Contents
Preface vii
1 Managing Science 1
2 Origins of E-Government 17
3 Developing a New System 37
4 Principal Investigators as Lead Users 65
5 Research Administrators as Lead Users 96
6 NSF Staff as Legacy Users 118
7 Legacies, Lessons, and Prospects 141
Appendix A. University Site Visits 163
Appendix B. Interview Summary Statistics 165
Notes 169
Essay on Sources 195
Index 201
Illustrations follow page 89
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Preface
This book has its origins in an offhand remark made by Bruce Seely, who at
the time was serving as a National Science Foundation (NSF) program officer
in science and technology studies. As a temporary program officer, or “rota-
tor,” Bruce looked around him during 2000–2002 and saw firsthand the changes
that NSF was experiencing with FastLane. It was a new computer system that
ran the central mission of NSF: making grants to the nation’s research com-
munity. “FastLane is fundamentally changing NSF,” he observed, “but NSF
doesn’t have insight into how it’s happening—or why.” His comment had stay-
ing power and unusual gravity, for here were two vital forces in contemporary
society—science and computing—obviously bound together in an immense and
consequential real-time experiment.
The authors began working together during the spring of 2006 at the Charles
Babbage Institute (CBI) at the University of Minnesota. Yost had arrived several
years earlier as associate director of CBI and was well versed in computer his-
tory. Misa was incoming CBI director. In March that year he went to a workshop
at Indiana University, where he had the good fortune to meet NSF’s Suzanne
Iacono. Over lunch, Iacono promptly agreed with Seely’s diagnosis about the
importance of FastLane and the need for insight.
In developing a proposal, Misa made a visit that fall to NSF in hopes of
locating research materials on FastLane. Traditional paper documents about
FastLane were not readily available. But he had luck in interviewing eight NSF
staff members, all of whom shared specific ideas about shaping such a research
project and candid personal assessments of FastLane itself. Our thanks to Dan
Atkins, Edward Hackett, Fred Kronz, Daniel Newlon, Robert O’Conner, John
Perhonis, Tom Weber, and Fred Wendling. Phone conversations with Bruce
viii Preface
Seely and Connie McLindon reinforced our emerging plans to make a full-scale
assessment of NSF and FastLane.
We needed to design a study that would capture the process of design and
development of FastLane; that would spotlight the crucial role of FastLane’s
users, at several levels; that would turn the seeming dearth of paper documents
and the evident enthusiasm of NSF staff to share their experiences into a robust
research plan; and that would capture the multidimensionality of computer sys-
tem development occurring in the U.S. federal government. In the back of our
minds was the question of the digital revolution: how was it that computing was
changing society and politics, identities and institutions? FastLane might be an
ideal case to explore these themes. It was a tall order, and a December proposal
deadline loomed large.
We crafted a research proposal to NSF, submitted it through FastLane, made
the deadline, and then—like countless principal investigators (PIs) beforehand
and since—waited for the assessment of merit review and the decision of a pro-
gram officer. We were fortunate in receiving support from NSF for this study
of NSF. A word about our relationship with NSF might be in order. Connie
McLindon, based on her deep experience with federal research management
(her key role in shaping the immediate forerunner to FastLane is examined in
chapter 3), recommended that we conduct this research as a grant rather than
under a contract. That way, she correctly indicated, the results are entirely the
investigators’ and the agency cannot influence their findings in any way. This
indeed was our experience with NSF. We had the good luck to find program
officers in NSF’s Human Centered Computing program who understood the
point of this study and arranged a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (IIS
0747445) to get the project off the ground and then, with a revised proposal, a
regular grant (IIS 0811988) to fully support the research. Wayne Lutters and
William Bainbridge were our program officers. We started work in 2007, spent
four years doing intensive research including interviews across the country, filed
our final project report in November 2012, and then completed work on this
book manuscript.
Our first thanks must go to the more than 400 interviewees who made room
in their busy lives to address our in-person questions about FastLane. We are
equally indebted to the 400 additional people who took the time to complete
our online interview questions. Together, they allowed us to create an unusually
large and diverse dataset about the design, development, and use of a comput-
ing system. NSF staff were uniformly helpful and unfailingly supportive. We
Preface ix
recorded interviews with members of the team responsible for designing, devel-
oping, and training for FastLane, including Jean Feldman, Constance McLin-
don, Carolyn Miller, Andrea Norris, Craig Robinson, Rich Schneider, Beverly
Sherman, George Strawn, and Frederic Wendling. Special thanks to NSF histo-
rian Marc Rothenberg, who helped us understand NSF’s internal dynamics and
culture. Documents now in his office’s possession are the best written sources
on FastLane. At CBI we worked with research assistants Jonathan Clemens,
Siddhartha Shanker, Joshua Welsh, and Joline Zepcevski. Katie Charlet, CBI’s
administrative assistant, took capable charge of the mountain of oral histories:
recordings, raw transcripts, edited versions, permission forms, and now the
electronic archive. At the University of Minnesota, we had the support of the
superb grants-administration staff and especially the attention of Gina McCabe
and Julia Sytina.
Our assessment of FastLane is overall a positive one. Yet as the publisher’s
external reviewer for this book pointed out, our portrait gives voice both to the
many supporters who praised FastLane and to the critics who saw its shortcom-
ings—or the alternative paths that might have been taken. Some of these paths
might yet be realized. We assembled a set of summary findings and lessons
learned in chapter 7. As users of FastLane now for nearly two decades, we strain
to recall the age of paper proposals. Perhaps we can leave our readers with
this image, from an NSF program officer who responded to our online inter-
view with a recollection of the paper covers, or “jackets,” that formerly wrapped
hard-copy NSF proposals: “One remembers the pre-FastLane era, memorably,
as ‘Stacks of jackets. Long hours in the office with stacks of jackets.’ ”
