 All right. Great. I'm Catherine Lawrence. I'm from the University of Michigan and the Science Gateways Community Institute, which is what we also call the SGCI. And it brings together people from seven universities to support digital resource creation, what we call gateways. And we support people around the country and projects around the country. So I'm here today to share with you what the SGCI address, how the SGCI addresses the challenge that is faced by a variety of the academic and nonprofit organizations where such projects that are like gateways or may not, although they may not identify themselves as such, are maintained and created. And so I'm going to first give you a description of the kind of situation that we support and then give you some examples of gateways and then finally the services that we offer. So what often happens is that an academic-minded person gets some kind of idea that is to improve the work processes that their discipline does frequently using some kind of shared digital system or resource. And that person may have an idea already of how to build a technology that will accomplish this, or they may not. They may know how to find a software developer that could create it, or they may not. They may know how to find funding that could support it. And they may pursue that, but they may or may not get funding for that. And then they also presumably know their academic community. And so they may be able to know how to grow that user community to use that software, or they may not. So at some point in those knots and so forth, they will hit a wall. And at that point, or maybe before then, this person might approach their university library. They might approach the research consulting department or some kind of local IT staff, or maybe even a dean. And they're looking for guidance, maybe funding, some sort of support. But quite often, those kinds of departments may not have the resources or the capacity to support that project. So this is where the Science Gateways Community Institute comes in. We're funded by the National Science Foundation to provide free or low-cost services that support the academic inventors that create these kinds of gateways. And the services also include various resources that I'll describe. But first, I want to give you a sense of what is a gateway. Look at that. This is what happens when you switch platforms. So talking about gateways is a bit like talking about the six blind men and the elephant. Depending on what the thing feels like or what it does, it might be called something a bit different. So gateways may be called things like virtual research environments or VREs, a research portal, a virtual lab. It might be plain old cyber infrastructure or a collaboratory. It also may be identified as being a component of e-research or e-science or it might be in support of citizen science. So we can define a gateway in three ways. So it could be an online community space for science and engineering research and education. But science and engineering are not necessarily required because we're funded by the National Science Foundation. You'd expect to find science in our name. But we do also support non-science projects as well, and I'll tell you about one of those. It could be a web-based resource for accessing data, software, computing services, and equipment specific to the needs of an academic discipline. So essentially it's providing some kind of interface that makes that a little smoother. And then it could be a way to help researchers, educators, students in the public gain access to sophisticated or limited resources. Sorry for those formatting things. It's always an adventure. OK, so here's some examples. And I'll first say that there's a small cadre of projects that do actually identify themselves as gateways. But we tend to see that the scope is a lot greater. So I'm going to give you some examples. They may or may not label themselves as gateways, but they've worked with SGCI. And so they recognize that this is applicable to them. And you're going to notice a diversity of goals and audiences, stages of growth. Some of them are very established. Some of them are quite new, some in between. And that's really to help you recognize these kinds of projects on their campuses when they come to you, because they may or may not be partway along. And what they all have in common is that they're trying to expand how the public or academics gain access to these systems that are often too sophisticated for the average user. Quite often it's a shared resource, or it's something that takes some expertise to learn. So this is the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which has a network of interactive, globally distributed sensors that provide near real-time access to the scientists. And so essentially what they call their cyber infrastructure enables multiple scales of marine observations to be integrated into one observing system for the scientific community to access. So this is a project that's been going on, and it's quite elaborate because it also involves those sensors and whatnot. Then the CUBE project is another one that we've supported. And in fact, we have a case study on our website that describes how this particular project has made use of every single area that we offer support services for. Everything from hands-on support to our events and so forth, and you'll learn more about that later. It is a community of biology and math educators who share resources and methods for teaching, essentially biological mathematics, or mathematical biology. Anyway, and it's essentially to help those educators find systems and tools and curricula for teaching students. The Distant Reader is a recent project that's joined our client list. This is a humanities-based project. It's for analyzing a body of scholarly literature, and then from that you can extract facts and concepts, and then it offers an interactive interface for using and understanding the results. And their goal is essentially to help people make more informed decisions than just through ordinary reading. And these folks, though, you can see from here, these are really very unusual interfaces, and so what they're coming to us for, for example, is to get help with that interface. The Cypress Project is a really established gateway. It has the goal of enabling large-scale phylogenetic reconstructions through analyses that are run on the exceed resources. It's used by everyone from research universities, K through 12 school systems, non-governmental and governmental organizations, and what I think is particularly cool about this project is this is a student who won a science fair, and he used this to map how HIV arrived in the Americas, so it was accessible enough for someone like him to access it, and it's been around for a while, so you can see, I mean, there's more than four and a half thousand publications that they can claim to have used their service. Another project that's kind of different is CIRA. It's the Coastal Emergency Risks Assessment, and it has a webmapper that is meant to be user-friendly in order to visualize hurricane data in these real-time interactive maps, and this is meant to service emergency managers, decision-makers, forecasters, and the scientific community, particularly in advance of a storm, so this is really different in that it does serve academics, but it also is providing a policy-based expertise and information, and then finally, this is a social science project called the Social Media Macroscope. Oh, sorry, this is the second to last example. They have the goal of making social media data, analytics, and visualization tools accessible to researchers and students at any level of expertise, so they're trying to make that also very easy to use. And finally, some of you may know about citizen science projects, so they are also, we would say, a type of a gateway. This universe is, they call themselves the world's largest and most popular platform, allowing hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world to come together to assist professional resources, and they have come to work with us and actually through, they wrote us into a grant, so that's also an option, if you wanna make sure you can really reserve someone's help, but also we have the sit-side.org website, and they provide a similar service which is giving tools and resources that allow researchers to customize their scientific procedures in one location on the internet, and then they can recruit people to help out also with that research. They can be, or they can just go as a volunteer and look for something to work on. So you can see from that that there are really diverse qualities that represent different kinds of gateways. We have different kinds of users, many different kinds of functions, and the SGCI supports them at any stage of development, anywhere from an idea to a mature project that's looking to be more sustainable. So I'm here today because we recognize that you might have projects like these on your campuses, and you may not have the capacity to support them when they come your way, and even if you're not working on projects like this at the moment or worrying about whether you can support them, there are faculty out there who are worrying about how they're gonna find someone to support them. So we have funding for several more years. Our initial grant was for five years with an option to renew for another five, but the NSF also wants us to look into how to make ourselves more sustainable as an organization such that we can eventually provide services, continue to provide some for free, but also work with others to find shared funding. So I'm gonna share with you what we currently offer, and I'd ask you to think about how these might fit with the problems that you see on your campus, how it might be appealing to you, and in what way, and if you have any suggestions or questions for me, I'll leave some time for that. So there are three main categories of what we offer. We have support for building and running gateways. We have education and training services, and we have opportunities for networking and community. And the team who provide all of these services, as I mentioned earlier, we're distributed across seven different universities, but we're very much interconnected. And so in fact, this is kind of a new way for us to think about conveying what it is that we do and trying to simplify it. So here's some more detail about each of these. So one of the big ways that people come to us is asking for support to build their gateways or to figure out how to run them more effectively. So this comes in the form of consulting services, and these are all people who have a track record of working on such projects. So one type of consultant is a hands-on software developer who can be quarter-time for anywhere from a month up to a year working on a project. So they have been asked to do things like make a gateway from scratch or also to develop a component that maybe the people creating the gateway that already exists don't have the expertise to do. Other consultants provide specialized expertise such as usability and graphic design, cybersecurity. We partner with an organization that specializes in that. We have business and sustainability planning and one of my colleagues, Nancy Maron, is hiding over here in the corner. She does sustainability, both educating and consulting and we also have marketing expertise. And then finally, we also offer one-on-one guidance on the process of creating campus-based groups that will support development on your campus. One of the big problems that we know people face is that they might go looking for a developer and they don't really know where to find that person. And in addition, when their project is over, that developer goes somewhere else. And so the idea of actually establishing a group that is a resource of people on campus who can have that career continuity for themselves but also make it easier for developers of projects to find them is a really, it's a very appealing idea. So we have someone who is looking at how to help other organizations do what has been done by several of the institutions that are part of SGCI have already, like these folks have already done as part of their campuses. So we have some flyers in the back of the room. One of them is about all of our services but there's one that has an ant holding very many different-like tools and that's about the campus service that we have. And then we have a catalog of both projects and components in it's searchable and browsable and things are tagged by discipline and technologies. So it's both to allow gateways to promote what they do as well as to let someone look for an example of something that is what they want to do and maybe could generalize from whatever technology that project has used. Pardon me? I do at the end of the slide deck so when you download you can go, you can get to that. And then finally we also have a hosting service that lets people set up using some of the common platforms and test them and we can also, you know, just you can get your gateway started on that service. Then the next major category of support that we offer in services is through education and training. So one of the areas that has been very well received is our boot camp and this is a week long intensive program and we invite two to three people from a given project they apply essentially and they come and learn about how to effectively build and sustain their gateway. And the people who teach it are all the various experts from our consulting services. So Nancy is part of that as well and people really appreciate being able to think from a perspective that they're not generally taught in graduate school. Most people who are making gateways come from disciplines that don't teach you how to think like an entrepreneur but essentially what they're doing when they're creating a gateway is something very entrepreneurial. We also have a three day conference every year and it includes also a full day of community led tutorials. So that's a great way to learn about new technologies and we have a collection of student programs that are providing opportunities to underrepresented students and faculty to learn about gateways and how to develop them through various kinds of courses and internships. We also have online resources as you would expect and that includes a bunch of searchable resources like publications and case studies, learning materials. We have webinars and those are all recorded and they're available on our website and a bunch of tech blogs on a variety of technologies and these are written by the people who have worked on various projects and implemented these technologies for these projects so that you can then understand how you might do the same for yourself. We're trying to work towards an opportunity for people to be self-serving in some ways so that we can devote our energy to the more unusual tasks. And then finally, one of the wonderful things about this is that we're creating a community of people who are quite often isolated. So often when you go into building a gateway you don't know that there are people who are doing these exact same things particularly because not everyone calls them gateways. They call them all sorts of different things and they may be the one person in their department that has thought of this or in their field. And so they don't realize that there are other people who've gone through this exact same process but for a different purpose. So of course our annual conference is a way to connect. We have poster sessions and of course people meet and it's a very friendly venue for getting to know each other. We have a community forum that is, it's a Google group so people can post questions there and we also provide a bunch of other resources like news announcements, we have a newsletter and job postings. And then also we have a variety of partners. One of them just spoke in this room previously, Globus. These are just a few of them but essentially the idea is that if you're talking with our consultants or you're just browsing our website we can help you identify if something might be a good fit for a project and then connect you with them. So just to give you a sense of where we've come we were founded in August 2016 and in just over a couple of years we have supported or connected with a lot of projects for people. So we've supported 56 gateways with direct consulting services. Some of them are still in process. We've had almost 1500 participants in the educational and training programs that we've offered. We've had 42 of those so far. Another thing is that we provide letters of commitment for people who are submitting grants. So if you're at the very beginning stages or even a project that's looking for ongoing funding you can request a letter of commitment and it essentially just, I mean it's an NSF sort of protocol and I'm imagining that other institutes do the same thing but essentially the letter says, if you get this money we will help you and in this case it's at no cost. So and what we think is pretty remarkable is that of the ones that have already been reviewed and decided upon we've had a 41% success rate. Now I don't know if that just reflects the fact that these projects are really interesting and innovative or if it's an extra little boost to know that there's somebody else that is funded by different NSF money to leverage their grant. I don't really know the cause but it's just kind of nice to know. And then as of last week, again sorry about the formatting but our gateway catalog has 378 gateways and 71 software components listed and you can search by institution so you could check and search for your organization and see are there any projects that are from our campus who are listed there already? So with that I'll just say I really do hope that you'll think about getting your campus involved with the work that we do particularly because most of our services are pretty free. I mean the bootcamp cost nothing except the cost of travel which obviously is substantial for a week but there is no charge for most of the meals and all of the instruction. So I'm gonna just put a summary here. So each of these are links. So when you download the slides, these are all links to the specific places on our site that you can find more information about this. I brought some flyers as I mentioned of both a general one. There's some cards about the bootcamp and also about our campus gateway group consulting back there and then finally this is how you can find me or sign up for a newsletter and such. So I see that we have about seven or eight more minutes. So if anyone has any questions I'm happy to talk about that, answer questions or also I would really like to hear if you have projects that sound like these kinds of projects, what ways we might adapt what we do to better serve the needs of libraries who are being approached by projects to create things. Basically I'm all ears. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you.