 I'm with the coalition for networked information. And I'm really delighted that you were able to join us here today. I'm so pleased to welcome Nancy Maron, who will be giving our webinar today as part of CNI's spring 2020 virtual membership meeting. Nancy is going to be talking to us today on the gateway project gateway focus week kickstarting digital projects with an intensive sustainability. And I think she's going to have some really interesting things to say about pivoting to a virtual environment, which many of us are very familiar with at this point. Before I hand it over to Nancy, I just want to call your attention to a few features of the webinar environment. We have a Q&A box. If you click on the button at the bottom of your screen that says Q&A, a little box will pop up and you are welcome to type your questions into that box at any time. And Nancy will answer those after her presentation. I'll come back on and moderate the Q&A. We also have a chat box, which will be sharing out some information to you some links to other information during the talk, and you're also welcome to share your questions or comments in that box. So without further ado, I want to welcome everyone again for joining us and thank Nancy for coming in presenting at CNI. And I'm going to hand it over to Nancy now. Take it away, Nancy. Thank you, Diane. And hello, everybody. It's nice to be here with you, even though this is one of those weird things where I'm going to give a presentation that I'm going to tell you how everything changed. And obviously it'll be way more fun to be doing this in person with everybody. But here we are. So my name is Nancy Marin. Some of you know me and we have met at this meeting in other years. And I have my own farm, which is called Blue Scotted Blueprint, but today I'm here representing the SGCI, the Science Gateways Community Institute, and talking about a wonderful, wonderful program that we are able to run with generous funding from the NSF. So Science Gateways. First of all, I think we have had some presentations at CNI in the past, but not that many. And it occurs to me that it might be a good place to start by kind of talking a little bit about what Science Gateways are in the first place. Because I see a ton of bridges in between the things we often think of as Science Gateways, or people may assume are Science Gateways, and the entire range of digital initiatives that I know people present on at CNI twice a year. So the most simple and direct way to think about a Science Gateway is maybe the original conception, where we're thinking about how to connect high performance computing power, expensive resources, things normal people can't really get a hold of on their own, or at least not easily. We're thinking about what researchers do when they develop computations, simulations, they have a lot of data intensive work and computationally intensive work to perform. And then you'll have audiences and people who want to use them, whether it's for their own research, whether it's students doing it, or just people who are not particularly comfortable rolling up their sleeves and digging into the cyber infrastructure world themselves. So Science Gateways are really invented as a bridge for people who need to do the work to get to that compute capacity without having to do all the work themselves. So that all sounds very technological and you might be led to think that a Science Gateway is just for folks working in STEM disciplines. So I thought I'd show a couple of slides that give you a sense of the breadth of what we actually are talking about when we're thinking about gateways because the definition has morphed over time in a way that is much, much broader than perhaps it used to be. So this is something like, so what example is the protein data bank? Now, something like the protein data, the actual protein data bank, which is a massive repository. And again, this is this has been actually around for a very, very long time in digital form and been online now for a very long time. And essentially a place for depositing protein structures used both by the people who are making the discoveries and also people who need to go and find them. There are other elements that are educational in addition, but this is used by researchers in the field. Here's another example. This is called CERA, the Coastal Emergency Risk Assessment Platform. And this is powered by teams of oceanographers and folks who have developed a model to predict storm surge. So this is another digital initiative developed by researchers, but with very, very immediate and important uses by a wide range of audiences, none of whom could think about doing that. Those computations themselves, for example, both academic researchers and even emergency responders. You'll notice in the upper left corner the name of some of the major funders of these projects. So these are coming out of a range of different funding environments. Another example NSF funded is Nano Hub, which permits people to do simulations and run models using again these HPC clusters located around the country to run them. But if you're coming into this environment to use it, you actually may not even need to know that you just know that you can do the work in this environment. But not everything is a pure research computation or an experiment or a model that's being run. Some things are just spaces to share information. And so here's where the definition begins to get a little broader. Planting science is a way to connect with the community to connect students with professional mentors who can coach them in doing experiments. CUBE is an interesting model as well. It's actually a platform for other projects where if you've invented something that could itself be a website that permits community to meet and share information, you can actually host your community in this bigger environment with other people doing the same thing. So whether or not there's a major computation in the background, it's just a platform that provides broader access. And just because I know there are plenty of friends and family of the humanities and other funders, for example, NEH and IMLS who are likely to be affiliated with CNI. In recent years, the group working on science gateways has been very willing to think about this more broadly and not just think about things that have to do with STEM disciplines, but projects that more broadly address the mission of bringing information and the ability to do research to people who don't necessarily have to be developing the website or savvy in cyber infrastructure themselves. So this example is the slave voyages database, for example. So that's just to give you a sense of the breadth of the kinds of things we're thinking of when we say science gateways. We've even, this is interesting, another type of example, we've seen folks come into the SGCI to get support in various ways that aren't even necessarily funded through a major federal or private funder. They're self-funded, and this is an example called Chem Compute developed by an instructor, by chemistry professor who wanted to develop a way for his students to learn material. So there's all kinds of ways that something can come to be thought of as a science gateway. So the team that developed this, and this is an NSF funded project, which I believe is going into its fifth year of funding. And the notion was project like this, and I've just hopefully shared a little bit of the diversity of what like this actually means, needs support. They need to talk to other people about how they get built. They may need developer support to actually build them. They want to get the word out and let people know they're there so they can be well used. And then my favorite topic of all, they need a path for sustainability. And here's where the worlds of like high performance computing, STEM resources and digital humanity start to come very, very close together. Because the challenges that these science gateways face when it comes to sustainability, to my eyes look extremely similar to the challenges that almost any digital initiative coming out of academia or cultural heritage is going to face. So with that in mind, several years ago, the SGCI was created. Today it has a few of these different branches that address different aspects of this. There's an education and training piece. There's a piece focused on network and community building, and that's where you'll see annual conferences taking place. And there's actually developer support attached to this as well. So if you were working on something and needed help building some element of it out. There are teams that can actually provide that support to you and to your team. Over the last several years, here's just the metrics slide. I will not read through it, but suffice it to say there's been a wide range of kinds of impacts that you can see of the things that the group has been able to do. And a lot of people have been engaged, whether it's having software built by our partners, whether it's participating in our workshops or showing up at our conferences. So in short, the sustainability is a way to give all these projects and the project leaders what they need to actually build things that are quite valuable without having to do everything themselves. So the topic of today's talk is really this gateway focus week, which as I mentioned, I'll tell you a little bit about and then I'll tell you what this year it will actually look like, which will not involve the word week at all. But for the last several years, twice a year, we have been running a five day intensive workshop that is geared to leaders of digital initiatives. I'm going to start calling it that instead of just science gateways, because it is really broad. And we bring them together. We're on site. We've been at various locations around the country. And over the course of that time, we actually take participants through a full curriculum that is geared to help them think about the key issues related to sustaining their project. And say a little bit more about what that looks like and and also the fact that because this is under the umbrella of this current NSF grant. This program is entirely at awkward at no cost to participants. In fact, the only cost that a participant has is getting themselves there and possibly packing in a meal or two that we may not provide. But otherwise, they have access to the curriculum to the instructors and the team of instructors and the wonderful company of their peers over the course of five days. So the teams come together. There's a structured series of exercises that we undertake. And the main motion is that these ideas build from simple ideas and a very exploratory sense of what's my project and what am I here for to how would I write a budget for it and what's my hypothesis about the funding sources that are going to actually support it going forward. And so you'll see people are constantly out of their chairs. It's an extremely dynamic environment with a lot of hands on exercises. Teams work together. We encourage people to come in teams because there's huge value, not just in sending your, your lead or your PI there, but often in having the disciplinary lead of the, you know, the, the, the researcher there alongside the tech lead often a marketing lead joins. Because it's often the only time that these people have had work face to face for such an intense amount of time. In addition, the other value people consistently report to us isn't meeting the other teams, because they find connections they didn't realize they had and they're able to find a lot of supportive peers to work with. So the flow of the information or the flow of the, of the coaching follows a certain path. We first encourage people to just articulate in a very basic way what they think the value is of what they've done for their users. And over the course of the week, we continue to refine this and refine this with them. And we do it through structured exercises that take them through understanding who their audience is. Being very specific about how finely tuned they can talk about a segmentation of who the different users and stakeholders are and the roles that they play. We set them up to do an additional piece of research when they go out so that they also understand the landscape that they operate in and some of these takes a form of these elaborate drawings and these schematics that they then explain to each other and to the instructor. We do a terrific session where a colleague comes in and leads a session on user-centered design, which everyone loves doing because it involves making fun of very famous other websites and how hard they are to navigate. And then we get into the nitty-gritty. So we start with this really kind of big picture, where should I live in the world? And then we say, right, now that you've figured that out, how are you going to pay for what is it cost to run? And how will you find all of the resources needed? And that takes over the second half of the program where we actually walk people through the steps of building up what we call an activity-based budget. Which, you know, is very different from saying, I would just like a large amount of money and we'll get as far as it allows us to get by the end of the grant. Not that anyone's budget looks like that, but we talked very specifically about now that you've identified some goals and things, very specific things you'd like to achieve. Who do you need to get that done? So it's a very different kind of exercise that people find more surprising than they would have imagined. We talked to folks through a range of different funding options. And often when people come in, they've had one funding option, which has been a grant. And we encourage people to explore things, not to go off in some crazy direction, but to take a measured way to investigate alternatives. And sometimes those alternatives involve simply unlocking additional sources of in-kind support. But the point of the exercise is not to assume that something is not possible until you've had a look. And finally, we actually use the word sales. And we certainly use the word marketing because we encourage people to think about how they're going to make the case for funding, whether it is financial or non-financial. What that support looks like, whether it's cash exchanging hands or not, is still going to involve some degree of selling. And we encourage people to practice their skills of persuasion while they're with us. Finally, we've added a new piece, which people love, which involves actually allowing other members of the participants' teams to get together and to work together to solve a specific problem that you come in with. And it could be a really, really specific situational problem to solve. Everyone sits around and there's a rapid fire process that takes place that generates a lot of ideas, prioritizes them, and then gets the rest of us on the hook for helping people going forward. And so that's called the brain trust. And every single day we have one so that every team participating gets a chance to be on the hot seat. So this is what a typical agenda looks like. People would come in, we'd have a half day together doing some great, you know, blue sky kind of drawings on the boards, talking about our project, working through the subject that I've just mentioned. And by the last day, the project or the week culminates in sharing what we call a pitch deck, which essentially outlines your sustainability hypothesis. Here's what I've been thinking about all week. Here's where I think I am on thinking about my users, where my project lives in the environment, how I'm going to fund it, and what comes next for me. And this is done with the entire group all in a circle. And again, it gives people a sense of pulling together what has been a lot of very creative thinking over the course of the week. We also encourage them, we require them to establish three months and six months goals, and we check back. So the notion of a community is a very real one. We're together in the real space in real time. And then afterwards we continue to check in with people at regular intervals over the first six months to see how they're progressing. So so far, we've had 240 people come through the program, and different engagements, some of them are this course, and actually some have been customized versions, because we've found that often people hear about this, and they say, Well, this would be nice, but I'd actually like it at my institution or my project has more people couldn't you come on site. And so we have all different flavors of this that we also customize. So there's us, but there's actually even more people than this. So, Julianne and I do most of the business strategy piece, Mike Netner is the lead PI of the entire SGCI and he's located at University California San Diego. And then my other colleagues on the slide and off the slide participate in a range of ways we bring in experts all the time to give special lectures on other topics. And people who have come through the program have loved it. In one case, it provided a way to get fully funded on a very, very early stage project. In another case, a much smaller project is formed internally, for example, at the federal agency NOAA was able to simply take the work they done with us and go back and make an argument for getting additional staff and the argument works. So we've seen all kinds of different results that come out of participating with us. I'll just mention that we have now had to go into a very different space. So our original hope was to be on site at Columbia at the first week in June. We will not be doing that. I'm following the lead of CNI and other creative thinkers in this space. We have totally reconfigured what it will look like, but we didn't want just to call it off altogether. So instead, Focus Week is going to be a virtual offering this year. And in the middle of June, the 16th through the 18th, we've actually come up with a way to offer a fairly painless way to get a taste of what the full program might look like. And as you can see on this slide, we're still holding out hope that we will have a chance to bring everyone back together. And so there will still be a formal application for Focus Week in its regular full format for later this year. So I'll tell you a tiny bit about what the short course looks like. First, like everything else is totally free, totally open. Instead of having, you know, you saw a full curriculum spread out over practically a week. We're doing it on just three days and we're doing it in bite-sized pieces. So every day for those three days, the first session is going to just be a fundamental. We're going to offer a nice short one-hour, you know, primer on the topic of the day with some food for thought, maybe some exercises to take away. And there will be a thread running through those lunchtime lectures. So if you go to all three, you're going to get a pretty good sense of what the scope of topics would be and you'll get the flavor of the kinds of things you might do in the fuller course. The special topics in the afternoon are going to be a little bit different. One might be cybersecurity. I think we'll probably do something on user experience. And again, you're free to come in for the noon sessions or just take a taste of a topic in the afternoon that you enjoy. But the benefit of registering and coming to the daytime sessions is that we are also, my colleague and I will make ourselves available in between those for office hours. Because we know they're often the sustainability questions folks have tend to be very specific and there's only so much that a webinar can offer. And so if folks are interested, we're going to be setting up 20-minute slots each of those days. And so those folks who have registered will have the opportunity to just fly up for time with us and we're more than happy to talk with folks about anything that can help them, even though it's a really short amount of time, but we'll try. So this is what it looks like. The first day we're going to start with an overview and we're going to share a little bit about our philosophy of what it means to be sustainable and the different directions that you can take and the different strategies that work. At this point, we have a lot of case studies to draw from both ones that are in the humanities and a whole bunch now that are in STEM and sciences, a project of all different shapes and sizes. And so we're going to share a bit of that with you in the first lecture. The second day is going to delve more into the external environment that you find your project in, who's using it, how to think about that. And I'm going to walk over here and ways that that can be useful to you. And then on the last day, we're going to talk about finance and budgeting. Sorry for the shift. Welcome to the New World. So we're not even calling this a full application process. We just want people to register. So if you're interested, bring as many people as you'd like. Please join us. Please consider registering and please dip into as many of the sessions as you would like. And obviously I'm happy to take any questions you have and and anything else. I think that takes us to the end of the presentation. Thank you so much. I was just trying to type in the your URL there into the chat box for folks in case they wanted to check that out. Thank you so much for that really interesting overview of the science gateways. First of all, which I think is such a fascinating and wonderful project. And then for talking to us about the sustainability workshops and a little taste of what you think it's going to look like this year. And with that, I would like to invite our attendees to share with us any questions or comments that you might have for Nancy. Are you familiar with the science gateways? Have you attended any of these sessions? Are you thinking of running anything similar? Are any questions about the process or the program? Please just click on the Q&A box or use the chat box and ask your question of Nancy now. I was wondering Nancy while we're waiting for folks to come in with their questions. If is there any process or program in place now to continue to foster these connections that people form when they're participating in the workshops, but between. In other words, after they go away sort of communities of practice. So what's so interesting is that people come from all different disciplines. So the community of practice ends up being about the fact that they're building a gateway. So it's almost like the software sustainability institute kind of community of practice. It's like people who are doing the building, but then also their partners who live in the academic disciplines they're from. In addition to staying with us because through the group I work with, we really do stay in touch. There are presentations at all kinds of conferences and these people become a network of people who show up at these same meetings and continue to do this research and talk to each other. But the SGCI does run an annual meeting and I think the call may still be open and may have just closed, but the meeting is slated for the fall. And it's an interesting meeting to keep to keep your eye on because that again is what they're hoping to continue to build into a real community talking specifically about the cyber infrastructure issues related to these sites. And again, for anyone on the call, the most important message is really that these things with the word science is in there, but it's almost science more in the sense of research than it is them. Because there's really, there's no reason that any discipline really wouldn't be relevant for the kinds of things we're talking about. It's more about the structure of the support. Right, right, sure. Yeah, and you mentioned that at the outset that the sustainability questions for the science gateways projects are very similar to just about any other digital project you might think of. I was actually wondering, are there ways in which the sustainability questions are unique to these projects. Yeah, I mean, I, I said. It's interesting, maybe. So, because there's something about because there is so much effort in the technical element that has to do in many of these cases with these complex kind of computational methods. And the fact that originally this comes out of working with the supercomputer center. People coming into the program can sometimes start with a little bit too much focus on the technology needed to run these. And not that that's not an important aspect of sustainability because certainly it is, but the focus in this particular program tends to be on the strategic choices you need to make about those things. So there's another group that can talk specifically about exactly how to build it. We talk about why you would choose to build something versus borrowing or making use of something that exists already. We might talk about the strategy of who are you building it for. Do you really need to build something that elaborate, given now what we know about the audience who will be using it. So we actually try to tie it back to the strategy that underlies it and the mission that underlies it before people set off on the building project. Right. Because you know people like to build things like to build really complicated things because that's fun to do, but not always the right way not always the right approach for something like it. So true. That's great. Well, and speaking about your plans for the coming conference. You know, we, you and I talked a little bit before the webinar started, you know, how, how some of these serendipitous experiences encounters with colleagues. I mean, do you, how do you, what's your feeling of how that's going to go and what might be enhanced what might be lost with what sorts of challenges you're likely to face. Doing it in the virtual version. Yeah. Well, I mean, as with everyone that you could have met. It's hard to turn these things around very quickly as quickly as I think we've all had to know. So the good and the bad is that we have to have to be a little kind with ourselves and have a slightly lower bar for how intense the collaborations can be. But the flip, the flip side of it is we're opening things wide open. So again, there's not really a restrictive application process. There's no limit. So our goal is really to get as many people to come as would like to come with no, no bar to entry, whether it's, you know, you're at a very early stage, you're just thinking about it. You once heard the word sustainability, you know, whatever the interest level is. At this point, we would just love everyone to come when people commit to coming for a week. The bar is much higher because our invest our investment is much higher in them. We spend a tremendous amount of time with every person and every team. So it's really important that the team be far enough along to have something that they're, you know, that we can all dig into. Yeah. Yeah. But this is our arms wide open. We hope everyone just comes in and get something out of it this time. So maybe, maybe a lot of opportunities there that wouldn't have been there otherwise for people who couldn't have, couldn't have made the time or the trip. Yeah. That's right. And you know, maybe it gives us a model for hybrid delivery down the road gives us a way to explore that a bit more too. Right. That's great. Well, good luck with with the event and we hope you'll come back and share with us how it went. And thank you again so much for agreeing to pivot this talk and speaking at CNI virtually we really appreciate it. And thank you to all of our attendees.