The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is awarded a grant to develop the concept of a Water Science Software Institute (WSSI) and to create a strategic plan to implement the WSSI. The WSSI mission will be to concurrently transform the research culture and the software culture of the water science community. Water sustainability is an urgent, complex, and trans-disciplinary problem. Complex biophysical and social processes influence water use, quality, and availability. Few research areas have a greater need for modern cyberinfrastructure tools than water science, yet progress on meeting the grand challenge of water sustainability is hindered by insufficient coordination and collaboration among the exceptionally diverse research communities involved and because community-developed software and cyberinfrastructure have not been professionally designed to be interoperable, sustainable, or reusable. This conceptualization phase will use an open community engagement process with assistance from the National Socio-environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), to involve the water science community in activities that simultaneously synthesize input for the strategic plan and serve as prototypes of the processes the Institute will use to achieve its mission. Specifically, the conceptualization grant will fund two synthesis workshops that will define the functional elements of the Institute, a community forum that will present the Institute concept to stakeholder communities for their input, and a software prototyping activity that will demonstrate and evaluate methods for developing a culture of production-quality software engineering within the water science community. Between community engagement activities, the project will produce white papers on the elements of the Institute that will be incorporated into the WSSI strategic plan.
The vision for the WSSI is to facilitate the development of sustainable, production- quality cyberinfrastructure that will be used to advance transformative water science. By developing activities that put water scientists, computer scientists, software engineers, and social scientists in the same room with a common purpose, such an institute would drive collaborations that produce innovative ideas and new research. The conceptualization approach will continuously define, test, evaluate, and refine the conceptual model of the Institute in order to produce a strategic plan that serves the needs of the stakeholder communities. This process and its products - the prototype elements of the Institute, the white papers that describe them, and the strategic plan - will advance an understanding of how to form and sustain effective trans-disciplinary collaborations. Software developed as a result of the prototyping activity will be used to advance water science research. Thorough planning will mitigate the risks inherent in standing up the first software institute and will address the challenge of building broad community support to sustain the Institute after NSF funding ends.
Water sustainability is an urgent, complex, and transdisciplinary problem. Complex biophysical and social processes influence water use, quality, and availability. Few research disciplines have a greater need for modern cyberinfrastructure tools than water science, yet progress on meeting the grand challenge of water sustainability is hindered by insufficient coordination and collaboration among the exceptionally diverse research communities involved in water science. Further inhibiting progress on water science cyber tools is the fact that community-developed software and cyberinfrastructure have not been professionally designed to be interoperable, sustainable, or reusable. During the award period, our team conceptualized a Water Science Software Institute (WSSI) to address water science grand challenges. A centerpiece of our activities was the creation of an Open Community Engagement Process that involved the water science community in prototyping activities. Through these activities, the WSSI team was able to simultaneously synthesize input from scientists on how to advance water science scholarship and establish novel processes that the WSSI will use to achieve its mission. During this conceptualization phase of the WSSI, our main goals have been to: (a) establish and operationalize our Open Community Engagement Process (OCEP) with assistance from the National Socio-environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC); (b) enlist input and participation from a cross section of water science disciplinary scientists developing software and conducting research using the OCEP model; and (c) develop and deliver advanced sustainable software best practices to water scientists. The activities that we have conducted in order to achieve these goals have helped us test and refine OCEP, coalesce community demand for a WSSI, and determine the types of processes in which our Institute would engage to achieve our objective of fostering co-development of software and collaborative scientific research. Our WSSI conceptualization activities concluded with the creation of a WSSI strategic plan in anticipation of implementation. The mission of our Water Science Software Institute is stated as follows: The WSSI will accelerate innovation in water science and management by identifying, creating, and supporting the critical software code and data infrastructure required to promote scientific discovery and realize transformational changes in the translation of water science knowledge into sustainable solutions that improve lives and communities.
