Researcher-Facing Track

Do you help researchers using IT tools to further their research goals?
Are you involved in research computing and/or data science training?
Do you consult with researchers on more effectively doing their research with advanced computing resources?
Compute with data?

The Researcher-Facing Track of the People Network brings together people from research computing groups, libraries, research institutes, and other organizations who support researchers in every phase of the research lifecycle. Many of us are also Data- & Systems-Facing, but this track is a community-led opportunity to discuss the practices, perspectives, and experiences of facilitation from any perspective.

Topics include:

  • Research computing facilitation
  • Outreach to all disciplines, esp. those under-represented, to aid with research computing resources
  • Education and training
  • The art and practice of facilitation
  • Increasing communications, collaborations, and team-building
  • Research computing UX and user-facing tech
  • And more, as determined by our members!

We connect via monthly calls and an email list. We also invite you to review and contribute to the Leading Practices of Facilitation!

The Researcher-Facing Track is supported by the team efforts of two Co-Coordinators and a Steering Committee. Send questions or comments, feedback, call topic ideas, etc., to the coordinators at rf-coordinators@carcc.org.

Join Us!

Join Us! Fill out our membership form to let us know who you are and what you’re interested in. We’ll add you to this email list and other Tracks that you indicate.

Monthly Calls

Monthly calls are on the second Thursday of the month, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT/ 8a HT. Connection information and links to any materials are distributed via the Researcher-Facing email list.

Upcoming Call(s)

Title: Open Capacity for Open Science: The Open Science Pool (OSPool) and OSG Services

Speaker: Christina Koch, Research Computing Facilitator, Center for High Throughput Computing, University of Wisconsin – Madison

Date: March 14th, 2024

Abstract:

The OSG Consortium builds and operates a set of pools of shared computing and data capacity for distributed high-throughput computing (dHTC). The flagship effort, the Open Science Pool (OSPool), connects about 4 dozen institutions in any given month, benefits 90 universities and labs every year, and executes about a million jobs per day. The OSPool is accessible to any US-based academic researcher and is accompanied by additional OSG Services, including the support of a Research Computing Facilitation team. Join this call to learn about the computing capacity of the OSPool, potential ways to partner with OSG Services, and lessons learned from the facilitation team.

Also, please take a moment to vote on these potential R-F call topics! Thanks for your input. 

Track Leadership

Track Coordinators (rf-coordinators@carcc.org)
Justin Booth, Dir. Research IT, Michigan State University
Tobin Magle, Lead Data Management Specialist, Northwestern University

Steering Committee Members (alphabetically)
Gladys Karina Andino Bautista
Carrie Brown
Katia Bulekova
Martin Cuma
Annelie Rugg
Kurt Showmaker

We also wish to thank persons who have previously lead and contributed to the Researcher-Facing track:

Former Track Coordinators

  • Dana Brunson (Internet2)
  • Bob Freeman (Harvard University)
  • Claire Mizumoto (U. California, San Diego)

Former Track Steering Committee Members

  • Christina Koch (UW-Madison)
  • Dirk Colbry (Michigan State University)
  • Lauren Michael (UW-Madison)
  • Amy Neeser (UC Berkeley)
  • Janna Ore Nugent (Northwestern)
  • Wirawan Purwanto (Old Dominion University)
  • Erin Shaw (USC)

Previous Call Topics

2/8/24 Title: JetStream2 – Researcher-Facing Resources and Support. video
doc
1/12/24 What’s Cool in 2024 video
doc
11/9/23 Exploring the Frontiers of CyberGIS and Geospatial Data Science video
doc
slides
10/12/23 Amazon Lightsail for Research video
doc
slides
09/14/23 Supporting Humanities Researchers: Roadblocks and Opportunities video
doc
slides
08/11/23 Evolution of Containers for HPC video
doc
slides
06/08/23 ACCESS Allocation Services: National cyberinfrastructure for research, development, and education no video
doc
slides
05/11/23 Current Research on Accessible Computing video
doc
03/9/23 STRIDES, Cloud Service Program at The National Institute of Health video
doc
slides
02/08/23 ACCESS Support Empowers Your Needs video
doc
slides
01/12/23 What’s hot in 2023? video
doc
slides
11/10/22 Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer video
doc
10/13/22 Research data storage video
doc
slides
9/8/22 Inter-institutional collaboration video
doc
slides
8/11/22 Highlights from PEARC22 video
doc
slides
6/09/22 Supporting researchers with the NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan Requirement video
doc
slides
4/14/22 Supporting Research Data Management video
doc
slides
3/10/22 Part 2: Sensitive Data in Research Computing – Through Cloud Services video
doc
slides
2/10/22 Sensitive Data in Research Computing – HIPAA support at the University of Utah video
doc
slides
1/13/22 Saying No! When, Why, and How to Say No to Researchers video
doc
slides
12/9/21 CaRCC/People Network End-of-Year Party doc
11/11/21 Supporting GPU computing video
doc
slides
10/14/21 Series on Leading Practices of Facilitation: Part 2: Improving our People-Facing Skills: Revisiting the Leading Practices of Facilitation video
doc
slides
9/9/21 Bridging the Gap: Reaching Underrepresented Research Domains for Large-Scale Computing video
doc
slides
7/8/21 Building Teams with Graduate Student Research Facilitators video
doc
6/10/21 No call. Virtual Residency week
5/13/21 Workflow Tools for Portable, Reproducible Data Analysis video – recording starts mid-call due to problems at the start
doc
slides
4/8/21 On Measuring the Impact of Training video
doc
slides
3/11/21 All About Orienting Researchers to Research Computing + Data Resources video
doc
2/11/21 Supporting Researchers with Containers video
doc
slides
1/14/21 All About CaRCC (… beyond the R-F Track) video
doc
11/12/20 CaRCC End-Of-Year Party doc
11/12/20 Profiling and Optimizing R Code in Your Workloads video
doc
slides
10/08/20 Writing More Equitable Job Postings video
doc
slides
09/10/20 Supporting research projects on the cloud video unavailable
doc
slides
07/09/20 Big Data, Big Compute Solutions, a Community Discussion video
doc
slides
06/11/20 How are we doing? A discussion on philosophies/culture, approaches, and tools for understanding creation of knowledge, metrics, and impact video
doc
05/14/20 Remote Support (cont’d): Working with Your Team Remotely video
doc
04/09/20 Sharing Good Practices in Remote User Support & Training video
doc
03/12/20 User Support via Ask.CI and Locales video
doc
02/13/20 Doing it in public: User support via Slack, open forums, Github repos and blogs video
doc
01/09/20 Handling Support Requests – A Community Discussion video
doc
12/12/19 University of Missouri reports and Researcher Facing/CI-Engineer Metrics video
doc
11/14/19 Open OnDemand User Experiences & Challenges video
doc
10/10/19 An Expansion of User Support Services for the Research Computing Group at the University of Colorado Boulder video
slides
doc
09/12/19 A Startup Framework for Building Digital Research Capacity and Community at UCLA doc
slides
08/08/19 PEARC19 recap! doc
07/11/19 Creating effective training materials doc
06/13/19 Lightning talks / Open mic sessions on track topics doc
slides