CaRCC developed an initial set of committees in October 2017 to focus on four areas as prioritized by a survey that reached a fairly broad audience of research computing and CI professionals, and these are listed below. If you are involved with CaRCC and interested in helping out on one or more committees, let us know at help@carcc.org!
CI workforce development/professionalization
Co-Chairs: Jim Bottum and Thomas Hauser
Description: This committee will interface with the many regional and national efforts aimed at advocating for, defining, and developing the CI workforce. This includes work aimed at defining the profession, titles, and roles of CI practitioners, broadly defined, and also to ascertain how to leverage CaRCC in career development, training, and socialization of the critical roles of the CI workforce in supporting research computing and researchers. The group should also consider developing a survey instrument to collect titles, roles, job descriptions and salaries (aggregated to de-identify). Development of this group will occur as a follow-up to the recent CI Practitioner meeting (August, 2017). A follow-up workshop on CI Professionalization was held in March 2018 just prior to CASC. A draft document on “Research Computing and Data Professionals Job Elements and Career Guide” emerged out of this workshop from a sub-committee of workshop attendees and CaRCC representatives. We welcome comments on this draft.
Defining stakeholders and value propositions
Co-Chairs: Andy Sherman and Barr von Oehsen.
Description: This committee will define the customers or stakeholder groups that will engage with CaRCC, and explore what these customers will gain in terms of services and deliverables, i.e. what is the value proposition that drives a given stakeholder to engage CaRCC? This is a critical element that needs to be well-defined for CaRCC to succeed, grow and move towards sustainability. Initial charges are to develop the list of potential stakeholders and to define each stakeholder group’s value proposition, followed by development of surveys to the stakeholders to validate the value propositions. The stakeholder groups and their value propositions must be clearly elaborated before CaRCC can define a business model, cost structure, and potential return on investment. A draft of the “Stakeholders and Value Propositions” was created 3/07/2018 and we welcome comment!
Developing the CaRCC and facilitator network
Co-Chairs: Lauren Michael and Dana Brunson
Description: This committee will lead the effort to coordinate the facilitators within the expanding CaRCC network. This group should also investigate and leverage regional and national efforts (RMACC, ACI-REF, Campus Champions, CI Engineers, etc.), train the trainer efforts, Carpentry, and related efforts. How should a network of facilitators grow yet remain focused, intimate, and engaged? How to transition new facilitators into best practice? How to develop new leaders? Note: this committee will need to coordinate with the CI workforce development committee. The committee has created the overall people-facing network (all involved in CaRCC), the researcher-facing network or community and is developing the systems-facing network. Soon this will expand to include the software and data facing and stakeholder facing networks. For more information on the People Network and the Researcher Facing Network, see the following Google Doc link.
Expertise and resource sharing
Co-Chairs: Jerry Sheehan and Shelley Knuth
Description: This committee will lead the effort to create models for expertise and resource sharing between institutions. Given the community survey responses, the initial focus is on human resource sharing for roles beyond facilitators, i.e. system administration, systems engineering, advanced networking, data management and storage, virtualization, etc. However, physical resource sharing can also be discussed. And given that a subset of survey respondents thought physical resource sharing was easy, perhaps a sub-committee can pursue that direction – i.e., what exists today that is working in this area?