The African Light Source Foundation and project (AfLS) is concerned with capacity building in terms of human resources, local laboratory support infrastructure, and regions of excellence; all towards the realization of 4th generation synchrotron light source on the African continent [1, 2]. We are building networks, identifying partners, organizing training, mobility, workshops, schools and conferences, and optimizing the use of existing funding instruments. We make and build upon strong foundations, a massive campaign for a strong researcher user base with an aware policy-maker cohort, across Africa, and globally linked, and we audit the progress in terms of science and capacity [3, 4].
For several reasons, synchrotrons offer a good opportunity to understand international professional networks of personnel, ideas, and resources [5]. First, all synchrotrons, even where they are nationally owned facilities, host researchers of different nationalities. The staff responsible for the maintenance and development of a particular synchrotron are almost always citizens of diverse nationality. In synchrotrons for their experiments form specific and closely interacting international scientific communities.
There are continual contacts between the 4 dozen or so synchrotrons operating in the world, and they evolve together. Owing to their similarities and the relations between them, synchrotron facilities can, at some level, be thought of being branches of an uber global firm. They are built successively, sometimes cooperatively using the same, complementary, or sometimes alternative competing technical characteristics. The choices of beam lines depend on globally comparative assessments of capabilities and availabilities. In any case, synchrotron facility construction and upgrading are continuous spiral development exercises with increasing accelerator, detector, optics, and data movement capabilities. There are constant conversations of lessons learned from the research conducted in each device, but also experiences and technical developments implemented on other synchrotrons. So, in a gross sense, synchrotron facilities evolve as incremental improvements of the same product, a single firm trying different variations of the product.
Every synchrotron facility operates on a strategy of openness to an increasingly wider range of users and to expand their pool of allies that help justify continued renewed investment (public and private) in generations of technology and discovery [6, 7].
So, it follows that that a major objective of aspiring synchrotron light source facilities should be to organize themselves into a common networked community, and to plug itself into to the community of existing facilities and users. Professional social networking follows from the seminal work of Granovetter who argued in 1973 that weak ties are particularly helpful in delivering new opportunities because they introduce novel information to a broader social network [8]. While Granovetter’s original analysis mainly focused on the labor market and employment, the same principles, in the main, hold true for diffusion of technical information and tacit knowledge as well as for efficacy and productivity of team science [9-19]. The central theory of the approach of this project is ‘embeddedness’, the core concept of economic sociology [20, 21].
Organization Framework of the African Light Source Online Community of Practice
The objective is to create an online community of practice for the African Light Source and its Partner Organizations (mainly disciplinary professional societies), plus participating synchrotron facilities using WordPress and (in the main) the social networking plugin, BuddyBoss [22-26]. BuddyBoss is a premium WordPress plugin that allows users to create online communities on their websites, including engagement features like extended profiles including bibliography listing, the ability to make connections by ‘friending’, ‘liking’ content, private messaging, forums and groups, individual and group blogs, etc [27]. BuddyBoss is a more comprehensively engineered version of the free plugin, BuddyPress [28-30].