Experimental Social Science
Research Network

ESSRN is an initiative of UCs Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, and Santa Barbara and of the National Research Platform to build a network of social science laboratories serving as a national and international hub for experimental social science research. ESSRN will seamlessly accommodate lab, field, and online experiments on a vast and diverse multi-institutional subject pool, blurring the lines between the traditional lab and online recruitment platforms. ESSRN will launch on NRP's Nautilus HyperCluster in early 2023.

ESSRN Technology

Experimental social science research increasingly relies on designs that outgrow the traditional laboratory setup. Examples include field-, large scale-experiments, and online-experiments. ESSRN revamps laboratory infrastructure to meet the demands of cutting-edge social science research. ESSRN's technological backbone is state-of-the-art containerization and container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes.

Features:

  • Workspaces accessed remotely 24h a day.

  • Start-to-end development and implementation of experiments in workspace.

  • High-performance hardware and network infrastructure, facilitating remote and large-scale experiments.

  • Code + data safely stored in ESSRN CEPH-Pools.

  • Curation of experimental software (oTree) on DockerHub, adjustable within workspace independent of user data.

If you are interested in joining and collaborating and/or if you have ideas for improving social science experiments, join our mailing list: info@essrn.org.