Author: Tom Cheatham

…from CaRCC Council Chair Thomas Cheatham and the leadership team:

Happy Holiday Season and winter from CaRCC! I am happy to see that CaRCC is making significant headway in its goals ranging from shoring up the internal workings and operations to significant progress with the various working groups. We have a better handle on document and meeting management, and are enabling the various working groups to more easily disseminate their information and get feedback. Feedback from some members of the larger ecosystem has people noting that they associate CaRCC with products for the community.

A group of us (*) recently met in Denver for a 1-day “re-sync” meeting to brainstorm on where CaRCC is– in terms of outcomes and lessons learned– and also, importantly, to discuss where CaRCC should be going. We summarized the activities and outcomes of each of the present committees. Broad themes we discussed included the need to avoid duplication of efforts, to embrace and honor existing identities, to fill gaps, and for CaRCC to serve as a catalytic space to define professionalization in ways that campuses can leverage and that represents connections across communities. Success that has already happened is that many institutions
have recognized the need for researcher-facing people to help researchers with their computing and data resource needs. Further development of an engagement framework and defining the broader ecosystem is on-going work.