Tom Cheatham

New NSF award for Research Computing and Data Resource and Career Center

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.

New and Improved CaRCC Charter!

The Charter working group has developed an updated charter that reflects how CaRCC has evolved and is operating. It was recently approved by the CaRCC Chairs Leadership team. Check it out ~~here~~ (updated version here), and send any comments/questions to help@carcc.org

CaRCC and Related Activities that Happened at PEARC19!

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.

December 2018 – news update

…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.

Summary of CaRCC reset meeting

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.