Author: Tom Cheatham

We’re delighted to announce NSF funding for a pilot CoE to build upon the work of several CaRCC working groups and advance support for RCD Professionals.

The new Research Computing and Data Resource and Career Center will create tools, practices, and professional development resources to support individuals and institutions. The main areas of emphasis include:

• A more robust and sustainable implementation RCD Capabilities Model and a new Community Dataset portal.
• Conducting an RCD Professional Staffing survey and sharing the results
• Advancing the adoption of the HR Job Family Framework
• Curating leading practices for staff professional development, and for involving students in RCD/workforce development

The RCD Resource and Career Center portal will gather these and related tools and resources together to support the community. We will place strong emphasis on helping to bridge the gap for smaller institutions that are struggling to get RCD programs started to support their researchers.

We are also excited to continue the work together with the various organizations that currently support RCD professionals and coordinate our respective work to provide a clear voice advocating for the profession. 

 Read the full announcement on the Internet2 website.

PEARC19 happened in Chicago July 28-August 1, 2019. There were a number of CaRCC and/or CaRCC related activities that took place and summaries of some of these may be of interest to the community (note that errors or omissions are the responsibility of tec3@utah.edu).

• MATURITY MODEL – Leveraging a Research IT Maturity Model for Strategic Decision Making: For the past couple of years, a group of people from an Internet2 committee, EDUCAUSE, and CaRCC have had meetings and a workshop to develop a tool or spreadsheet that ranks maturity in many elements of the “facings” (researcher-facing, systems-facing, leadership-facing, etc) across various dimensions. The intent of this workshop is to introduce the maturity model and have participants go through parts of it as a beta test to help us evaluate and improve the tool. For more information about the workshop check out the PEARC19 submission (or e-mail interest to help@carcc.org)… And if interested in keeping up or volunteering or any other participation please fill in this interest form. An updated maturity model, based on comments from participants, will be available “soon” and beta’ed again at the EDUCAUSE meeting.
• ECOSYSTEM OF RESEARCH COMPUTING AND DATA – A panel on defining and ultimately sustaining the ecosystem of research computing and data convened during the first plenary. The ecosystem of research computing and data is broad, hard to define, and expanding. Panelists from different organizations gave their perspective. A link to the presentation is here.
• CI PROFESSIONALIZATION – A panel on Professionalization and Career Arcs for Roles Supporting Research IT/CI. Discussed were the job family matrix and a guide to the job family matrix. We will have a link to the presentation soon.
• TOWN HALL – “CaRCC”, broadly defined, Futures and Sustainability Town Hall. A running note that came from the town hall is on Google.