Charles Babbage Institute: FastLane Oral History Public Archive

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.