This award will support a 1.5 day workshop in Arlington, VA to bring together the community of SI2 awardees with the aims of: 1) serving as a forum for focused PI technical exchange, through an early evening poster session; 2) serving as a forum for discussion of topics of relevance to the PIs from topics emerging both from within NSF and from the broader community, by informing the attendees of emerging best practices, and stimulating thinking on new ways of achieving sustainability and of ensuring that the foundation laid by SI2 is preserved into the future; and 3) gathering experiences and a shared sense of best practice that results in a published workshop report.
The workshop will bring together researchers who are a proto-community of NSF open source software developers. The meeting will examine the characteristics of the community, and consider whether the products from the program can be enhanced by giving the community a new identify and new way of looking at itself. The meeting will also address citation, attribution, and reproducibility, which are three related topics often discussed in the context of data, but less so in the context of software. The attendees will consider practical steps that could be taken to advance software citation and science reproducibility. Finally, sustainability of software is a major topic for NSF and for the SI2 PIs. The meeting will highlight new ways of thinking about software sustainability, drawing on experts in the field and on recent SI2 EAGER funded projects that are studying the community to help the workshop attendees in their thinking about sustainability.
The community outputs of the workshop will be: posters developed by the SI2 PIs that will be shared amongst the attendees and shared more broadly on the workshop web site; an experiences report (licensed under a Creative Commons license) produced by the award PIs, distributed via the workshop web site, via email to participants who will be asked to disseminate among their project colleagues and peers, and via an archive repository through which it will be accessible through a persistent ID; and attendee journalism during the event in the form of a public Google doc and public Twitter stream.
The second annual NSF Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) PI meeting took place February 24-25, 2014 in Arlington, VA. The specific objectives were to stimulate discussion, create the opportunity for new connections and collaborations among SI2 PIs, and to produce a workshop report describing recommendations that could improve scientific software practice, particularly in NSF-sponsored program areas. Findings from the workshop were articulated in the final workshop report and covered several areas relating to science software, including: 1) Attribution and Citation, 2) Reproducibility, Reusability, and Preservation, 3) Project and Software Sustainability, and, 4) Career Paths in research software. Integration and improvements in scientific software have a huge impact on all disciplines of science and engineering. Recent studies have estimated that over 90% of scientific papers utilize scientific software in some manner, and therefore the impact of improvements is potentially immense. While this single workshop will have a limited direct impact on the integration of scientific software in one funding cycle, the discussions and collaborations it spawned will create projects that tremendously alter the software landscape by increasing capabilities of software systems, integrating software systems that are currently fragmented, and thereby making research across disciplines more efficient. The workshop ignited a wide variety of discussions among investigators of SI2 projects that will continue to influence the pace and direction of development of scientific software for years to come.
