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Welcome to CaRCC

CaRCC – the Campus Research Computing Consortium – is an organization of dedicated professionals developing, advocating for, and advancing campus research computing and data* and associated professions. Current focus areas include building community among research computing and data professionals (see the People Network), connecting the broader research computing and data ecosystem, professionalization and workforce development, and defining stakeholders and shared value propositions for the community at a time of accelerating change.

More info at https://carcc.org/about/.

* Research computing & data involves people, scholarship, and resources… (more…)

October 2022: Upcoming CaRCC People Network & Community Calls

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We also highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

We’d also like to announce our new Strategy & Policy-facing Track! Many months in the works, this track is coordinated by Melissa Cragin (SDSC/UCSD) and Patrick Schmitz (Semper Cogito), and already has a robust steering committee. Many thanks to these volunteers for stepping forward, and we hope you will join us when the track has its inaugural call on Wed 10/5 at 12p.

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Career Arcs paper wins Phil Andrews award at PEARC22!

Career Arcs WG members presented our paper “Understanding Factors that Influence Research Computing and Data Careers” at the PEARC22 conference in Boston. The paper was awarded Best Full Paper, Workforce Development, Training, Diversity, and Education, as well as the Phil Andrews award, granted to a manuscript deemed to be the most impactful in practice of research computing. See also the University of Central Florida post and the CI Compass post.

The primary objective of this research was to identify factors that attract professionals into the field of research computing and data, factors that influence their career advancements or changes within the RCD field, and factors that cause them to leave and pursue other fields.

Ranking of factors defining “Advancement”, sliced by RCD Career Stage.

This work is part of a larger project to describe different possible paths for RCD roles, and to help hiring managers recruit and retain people in these roles. In the next phase of our work, we are looking to gather deeper individual narratives through a series of interviews of RCD professionals in various phases of their RCD career journeys. Our hope is that these narratives will illuminate possibilities for individuals considering or already in RCD careers, as well as helping hiring managers understand fruitful domains and populations for recruitment.

Who We (RCD Professionals) Are

Thanks to the 563 RCD professionals who took the 2021 Workforce Survey, we have a better understanding of who we are as a community.

The first results from the survey were presented at PEARC22 – Characterizing the US Research Computing and Data (RCD) Workforce – and the data is available on Zenodo. While you can make your own data visualizations, there are now also visualizations of the results available on the RCD Nexus site that you’re welcome to use.

Here’s a preview:

 

 

 

Visit the RCD Nexus data page for more!

September People Network & RCD Community Calls

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end) and other events from our RCD ecosystem partners. For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. If you’re not on our mailing lists, please fill out our Join the People Network form.

CaRCC People Network Calls:

Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)

Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival: Data Collection, Research and Outreach discussion facilitated by Raba Al-Araji, Senior Epidemiologist at CARES
Tuesday, September 6, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

Cardiac arrest resuscitation is an important measure of a community’s emergency response readiness. Successful resuscitation requires involvement by a range of individuals including bystanders, emergency medical dispatchers, first responders, paramedics, and hospital providers. The Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES) allows communities to benchmark their performance with local, state, or national metrics to better identify opportunities to improve out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) care. By creating an easy-to-use and flexible system to collect OHCA data and forming a community to share best practices, CARES has transformed the way EMS agencies are treating cardiac arrest. In this presentation, we will cover components of the CARES system including, but not limited to, the data collection process, research and data sharing, as well as the different ways that the data is translated for scientific and lay audiences. 

Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)
Supporting researchers with interinstitutional collaboration, facilitators TBD
Thurs, September 8, 2022, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

Continue reading “September People Network & RCD Community Calls”

August People Network and RCD Community Calls

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We also highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

CaRCC People Network Calls:

Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)

There is no call in August. Join us in September!

Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)

Highlights from PEARC22, discussion facilitated by R-F Steering Committee

Thurs, August 11th, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

Back by popular demand we bring you the Researcher-Facing PEARC recap for our August call! The advanced computing community reunited in Boston for PEARC22 and during this call we will share highlights, explore what we learned, and discover some nuggets that you may have missed! If you were not able to attend the conference, this will be a great opportunity to get caught up. Please join to contribute your favorite PEARC22 moments. Drawing from what we learned at Boston, we will also dialogue around new topics for the R-F track in the coming year. 

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CaRCC at PEARC22!

In lieu of July calls for most People Network tracks, make sure to check out the below events next week at PEARC22, all of which are a direct result of CaRCC-associated efforts for the RCD community. (See the full PEARC22 schedule here.)

Sunday, July 10:

  • RCD Nexus Day (colocated event), all-day parallel sessions on student/staff workforce development and on the RCD Capabilities Model ‘Essentials’ version

Tuesday, July 12:

  • Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) Town Hall (panel, organization update)
    10:30 AM-12:00 PM, White Hill Room
  • Understanding Factors that Influence Research Computing and Data Careers (Best Full Paper, Workforce Track; Phil Andrews Award)
    3:00 PM-3:30 PM, The Loft
  • Characterizing the US Research Computing and Data (RCD) Workforce (paper)
    3:30 PM-4:00 PM, The Loft
  • Words Matter! Progress in Promoting Inclusion through Language in Advanced Research Computing (panel; CaRCC represented among other organizations)
    5:00 PM-6:00 PM, The Loft

Thursday, July 14

  • Plenary and Awards (above RCD Career Arcs paper receiving Phil Andrews award!)
    10:00 AM-12:30 PM  Ballroom A

We hope to see you there!

Certified Cyberinfrastructure Facilitator Training and Development (CCIFTD) BoF at PEARC22

Attending PEARC22? Don’t miss this birds of a feather (BoF) session organized by Henry Neeman (University of Oklahoma), Dana Brunson (Internet2), and Dirk Colbry (Michigan State University).

Thursday, July 14 from 9-10am in the Berkeley/Clarendon rooms

Overview: The Certified Cyberinfrastructure Facilitator
Training and Development (CCIFTD) program is a first-of-its- kind, non matriculated certification of professional development for CI Facilitators. CCIFTD’s role is to attest to proficiency in core skills needed for facilitating computing/data-intensive research, across all Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The emphasis is on crucial professional/interpersonal skills, and complementary CI technical topics. CCIFTD focuses on establishing both (a) the set of skills and (b) a means for determining whether a CI Facilitator has these skills.

Motivation: The CI workforce suffers from a critical deficit of CI Facilitators, the CI professionals who work directly with researchers to advance computing/data-intensive aspects of their research. a vital role at many research institutions. Currently, there is a clear sense of the nature and value of the CI Facilitator role, but no well-defined set of skills agreed upon by the CI Facilitator community at large.

Methodology: 1. Determine the skills that are most valuable
for CI Facilitation, by surveying (i) experienced
CI Facilitators, (ii) CI organization leaders such as
supercomputing center directors, and (iii) STEM researchers
who use CI. 2. For each such skill, develop a badge,
specifically a training mechanism, an examination instrument,
and its scoring rubric, via pilot testing at workshops and
online. 3. Construct certification pathways, subsets of badges
that collectively merit certification. 4. Test badging methods.
5. Evaluate the CCIFTD program, both formatively during this
pilot project and summatively at the end, to improve CCIFTD
as it progresses and to determine how successful it has been.

2022 RCD Capabilities Model Office Hours

Have questions about how to get started with the Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model? Or are you already working with it and just want to discuss the process, or a particular aspect of the assessment tool? Join working group members and your colleagues in the community at one of our upcoming Office Hours to get help, ask your questions, and share your experiences! Drop in for a few minutes or stay for the whole hour.

Office Hours for 2022 are scheduled for:

the 2nd Tuesday of each month

for 1 hour at 1pm ET, 12noon CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

For details on how to join, email the RCD CM working group at capsmodel-help@carcc.org, or subscribe to the capsmodel-discuss@carcc.org discussion list.

PEARC21 report: Building a shared RCD community resource

It’s almost PEARC conference time again and we’re looking forward to the Fifth Workshop on Strategies for Enhancing HPC Education and Training on Monday, July 11, 2022. 

That made us look back and remember some of the great things that happened at last year’s PEARC conference. In case you missed it, check out this report: Towards a National Best Practices Resource for Research Computing and Data Strategic Planning. It shares the activities and findings of a CaRCC RCD Nexus workshop that brought together Research Computing and Data (RCD) professionals to discuss leading practices for developing effective strategic plans for their Research Computing and Data programs. 

The 2021 workshop had three goals:

  1. Share the experiences of universities who are currently using the RCD Capabilities Model as part of their RCD strategic planning work, including lessons learned. 
  2. Discuss the range of RCD strategic planning models across the community and identify approaches to building a strong strategic planning practice. 
  3.  Work towards the development of a shared community resource to support strategic planning for RCD, identify potential elements of such a resource and a near-term roadmap for development. 

The report documents the workshop activity and findings, including shared observations as well as recommendations. In particular, it identifies four themes that emerged as “Desired elements of a strategic planning resource”: 

  •  A repository of templates, examples, and models of strategic planning 
  •  A collection of narratives and use-cases that describe successful programs 
  •  Examples and practices for communication strategies related to strategic planning 
  •  A program of mentoring and identifying expertise related to strategic planning 

The information and insights  in this report are being used to inform what we make available in our RCD-Nexus Resource and Career Center. Want to know more? Read the full report.

June Line-Up of CaRCC’s People Network & other RCD Community Calls

Greetings to all members of the CaRCC People Network! 

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We also highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

If you’re not on our mailing lists, please fill out our Join the People Network form and join our Slack channels.

Continue reading “June Line-Up of CaRCC’s People Network & other RCD Community Calls”