Strategy and Policy-Facing Track

Do you lead a team of RCD professionals? Are you involved with the strategic planning for such a group? Are you interested in growing your leadership skills and/or your management and mentoring skills? Are you looking for good practices on budgets, finances, and how to communicate your group’s needs to senior leadership? Join your peers to discuss these topics and more on the Strategy and Policy-Facing Track of the People Network!

Some of the ideas we’d like to explore include the following (but we want to hear your ideas as well!)

• Updates from events and meetings of peer organizations for RCD leadership (e.g., CASC meetings, the EDUCAUSE conference, etc.)
• How do build a strong impact report for your program
• Mapping influence networks on your campus
• How to create compelling value propositions for your key stakeholders
• Where to go for management and leadership training
• How to share resources across centers? Issues finance, legal, and practical.
• Recharge models, pros and cons
• Models for IDF/Overhead distribution and implications for program funding
• Organizational models (where your team sits and who you report up to) and the implications for strategic planning
• How to speak to finance teams
• How to support regulated research and sensitive computing/data
• Your suggestions here!

Some of these topics overlap between this track and others, especially the Emerging Centers Track. We’re working with our peer track coordinators to explore how we can collaborate on these, possibly exploring the topics from different perspectives in our respective track meetings.

We connect via monthly calls (details below) and an email list: strategy-and-policy-facing-track@carcc.org.

Join Us!

Join Us! Fill out our membership form to let us know who you are and what you’re interested in. We’ll add you to this email list and other Tracks that you indicate.

Monthly Calls

Monthly calls are on the first Wednesday of the month, Noon ET/ 11am CT/ 10am MT/ 9am PT. Connection information and links to any materials are distributed via the Strategy and Policy-Facing email list.

Upcoming Call(s)

June 7th and July 5th: Documenting metrics for RCD programs. From reporting operational performance metric in terms of system up-time to research impact metric of grant dollars generated, every RCD program uses some sort of performance metrics to showcase its impact to various audiences. In this two part discussion series, we will explore different types of metrics in use at various RCD programs which are diverse in maturity/size. The first session will focus on the data collection done in compiling metrics and the follow up session will be on how the collected data is used.

Track Support and Coordination

The Strategy and Policy-Facing Track is supported by the combined efforts of our Steering Committee and two co-coordinators. Send questions or comments, feedback, call topic ideas, etc., to the coordinators at spf-coordinators@carcc.org.

Steering Committee Members:
Amit Amritkar (Penn State)
Ann Kovalchick (UC Merced)
Carolyn Ellis (UC San Diego)
Claire Mizumoto (UC San Diego)
Jackie Milhans (Northwestern)
Jenn Schopf (TACC)
Jim Wilgenbusch (Minnesota Supercomputing Institute)
Preston Smith (Purdue)
Rich Knepper (Cornell)
Vessela Ensberg (UC Davis)

Track Coordinators