ecosystem – CARK

Join us for RCD Nexus Day at PEARC23!

Registration is now open for the second annual RCD Nexus Day, a one-day workshop and networking event just for research computing and data (RCD) professionals on Sunday July 23, 9am-7pm preceding the PEARC23 Conference in Portland, OR. It’s an official PEARC co-located event, and there’s no additional cost to attend. Connect with your peers as we explore the topics that matter to you and your RCD career, including:

Student and staff workforce development topics and practices
Understanding the RCD Capabilities Model assessment tools, and how best to use them at your institution (details below)

The event will be held at the main conference venue, the Oregon Convention Center. Space is limited and last year the event reached capacity, so don’t wait to register!

Travel support is available for those at U.S. institutions who request it by June 28. Just indicate your need when you register and we’ll send further information.

Check back here for a detailed agenda — coming soon!

Register now! Free Virtual Residency Workshop on Research Computing

Do you want to learn how to better help researchers at your institution use research technologies? Would you like to make professional connections and meet others working in the field of research computing facilitation?

The Virtual Residency Summer Introductory Workshop on Research Computing Facilitation is designed to sharpen your skills and connect you with colleagues. Registration is now open for the free workshop that will take place on Zoom June 26 – 30.

CaRCC/RCD Nexus 2022 Retrospective

Greetings, research computing and data (RCD) professionals! As we usher in the New Year, CaRCC and RCD Nexus would like to take a moment to look back on and celebrate some of our community’s exciting accomplishments in 2022:

To formalize and ensure community input and evaluation, CaRCC formed a new Advisory Committee and held its first annual meeting in January, 2022. The group consists of 12 members selected for their leadership and expertise within the broader RCD and cyberinfrastructure landscape. The group is instrumental in long-term planning as CaRCC continues a period of rapid growth.

We ramped up the work of our RCD Nexus NSF Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence (CI CoE) pilot grant, and began to provide more resources than ever before to both the CaRCC and broader RCD community. The RCD Nexus website currently serves as the CaRCC Career and Resource Center.

In May, 2022, CaRCC activity leaders, advisory committee members, and peers from across the RCD community met in Denver and joined remotely for a Strategic Planning Meeting. The meeting included discussion around CaRCC’s role in defining a framework for an RCD-CI professional society.

CaRCC has helped to facilitate the RCD Community Builders Group, a collaborative effort among nine RCD-CI organizations working together to support the community at-large. The group has been meeting monthly since March 2022. Additionally, CaRCC has formalized a partnership and collaboration with the CASC organization and had two meetings and presentations during which the groups discussed opportunities for collaboration.

People Network Calls to Ring in the New Year!

Mark your calendars for the below People Network Calls in January (Zoom details at the end). For handy calendar entries, please try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We’d also like to highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

Additionally, note that we are repeating the CaRCC Parade this year, an opportunity to learn about CaRCC and to hear directly from group coordinators on updates and advances over the past year.

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.

Catch CaRCC at PEARC20!

The PEARC20 Virtual Conference (July 27-31) has posted the schedule that includes many great workshops, tutorials, presentations, and panels.

Here are some of the CaRCC-related activities you won’t want to miss:

CaRCC Town Hall – Tuesday, July 28, 12:00pm – 1:20pm Pacific Time: Come one, come all to hear updates, discuss, and provide feedback on CaRCC activities.
People Network
- Workshop – Supporting Computational and Data-intensive Research through Research Computing and Library Collaboration – Monday, July 27, 8:00am – 5:00pm PT
Ecosystem Working Group
- Presentation: Fostering Collaboration Among Organizations in the Research Computing and Data Ecosystem – Wednesday, July 29 in the 12:00pm – 1:20pm session.
RCD Capabilities Model Working Group
- Presentation: A Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model for Strategic Decision-Making – Thursday, July 30 in the 8:00am-9:40am PT session.
- BoF: Preparing EPSCoR institutions for Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model engagement – Thursday, July 30, 3:35pm – 5:00pm PT.
- Workshop: Leveraging a Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model for Strategic Decision-Making – Friday, July 31, 8:00am – 5:00pm PT.

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.