Managing the Melting Pot

1
Managing the Melting Pot

• Group 4

2
Group focus and boundary conditions

• Not heterogeneity of resources and resource
  demands
• Rather, catalyzing or expanding roles required to
  successfully produce cyberinfrastructure

3
Categorizing the CI community

• Domain scientists
• Cycle-oriented vs. data-oriented
• Continuum of exposure across domains
• IT People
• Research-quality code vs. Production-quality code
• High variation in approaches
• (continued)

4
Categorizing the CI community

• Policy Makers/Regulators, Administrators
• Local to global
• Existing application space to future application
  space
• Project Technical Managers

5
Project Technical Management

• The character of CI software will require a
  different quality of development than has been
  typical of research software
• Therefore, software development within CI
  projects must be more professional
• Increased professionalism will require an
  expansion of the use and training of project
  technical managers.

6
Benefits of expanding the use of project
technical managers

• Provide accountability and direction
• Ensure progress toward deliverables
• Model and introduce professional development
  practices
• Increase efficiency
• Free PI attention to focus on intellectual
  leadership

7
Drawbacks of expanding the use of project
technical managers

• Avenue for micro-management
• Competes for scarce resources
• Limited labor pool
• Experience within labor pool not matched to needs
  of CI projects
• Potential cultural conflict
• Increase fragmentation of PI attention.

8
Encouraging increased professionalism in CI
project development

• Resource providers
• Longer-term funding
• Change proposal review criteria
• Increase funding
• Resource users
• Willingness to use funds for project management
• Study success cases (e.g. NCSA Expeditions, BIRN)