Charles Babbage Institute: FastLane Oral History Public Archive Published Date: 2015-09-25 Author(s): Misa, Thomas J. and Yost, Jeffrey R. Author Contact: Misa, Thomas J. (cbi@umn.edu) This archive of oral histories provides a large dataset on the design, development, and use of the National Science Foundation's FastLane computer system. FastLane was developed in the 1990s and made mandatory for agency-wide submission of proposals in October 2000; it became NSF's core system used in all phases of grants management. With support from NSF's Human Centered Computing program (details below), researchers at the Charles Babbage Institute (principally Jeffrey Yost and Thomas Misa) conducted extensive oral histories during 2008 to 2011. More than 400 in-person interviews were conducted with NSF staff and managers as well as university researchers, sponsored projects staff, and administrators during site visits at 29 universities. In addition to traditional in-person interviews, the research team designed and built an online interview platform that permitted an additional 400 online (self-directed) interviews. Around 80 percent of our 800 interviewees agreed to make their responses available to the public, the basis for this public dataset of 643 interviews. This research formed the basis for a book-length study, co-authored by Misa and Yost, entitled _Fastlane: Managing Science in the Internet World_ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) with ISBN 9781421418681. The interview transcripts are here stored in two files: in-person.zip and on-line.zip. The in-person interviews are identified by PROJECT_INSTITUTION_NAME_DATE. For example FL_NDSU_SlangerM_2008-04-28 is an interview done for the FastLane project at North Dakota State University with Marie Slanger on 28 April 2008, while FL_NSF_CovertK_2011-02-15 is a FastLane interview done at NSF with Katharine Covert on 15 February 2011. Alphabetized in a directory, it is easy to group the universities together or to identify a specific person at NSF. Methodology We asked on-line interviewees to choose one of three roles (NSF, PI, or Sponsored Projects) but we could not be positive of their institutional affiliations. These interviews are identified by ROLE_Interview_AnswersNUMBER. For example, PI_Interview_Answers313public is PI interview number 313 (where this number was a database index number ranging from 300 to 800). Most interviewees, but not all, readily identified their universities. In-person interviews methodology 1. Interview conducted and recorded by PI, co-PI, or GSRA 2. Recording transcribed 3. Transcript lightly edited (for readability only) by CBI 4. Interview sent to interviewee for editing/review 5. Interview finalized and saved as a pdf On-line self-directed interviews 1. Email sent requesting participation 2. Interviewee registered with the online platform (created by our research team) and chose a role of PI, NSF, or Sponsored Projects personnel 3. Interviewee responded to interview questions 4. Interviewee saved the interview as finished or for later completion 5. Interview transcripts were saved as pdfs without editing Special thanks to NSF Historian Marc Rothenberg; to CBI research assistants Joline Zepcevski, Joshua Welsh, Siddhartha Shanker, and Jonathan Clemens; and to CBI's administrative assistant Katie Charlet, who organized this online archive. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0811988, "Designing and Using FastLane: Distilling Lessons for Cyberinfrastructures." This project description as well as links to all interviews both in-person and online can be found at www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/fastlane. Suggested Citation Misa, Thomas J.; Yost, Jeffrey R.. (2015). Charles Babbage Institute: FastLane Oral History Public Archive [dataset]. Retrieved from the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota, http://hdl.handle.net/11299/174487.