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.
NSF's vision of a Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) identifies advancing new computational infrastructure as a priority for driving innovation in science and engineering. Innovation occurs through advances in computing facilities, scientific instruments, software environments, advanced networks, data storage capabilities, and the critically important human capital and expertise. Software is thus an integral enabler of computation, experiment and theory and a central component of the new computational infrastructure. The Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program of CIF21 supports sustainable software in support of innovation in science and engineering. The second annual NSF Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) PI meeting took place in Arlington, VA February 24-25, 2014. It was hosted by Prof. Beth Plale, Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame, and Matt Jones, University of California Santa Barbara with additional organization provided by Robert Ping, Indiana University PTI. The workshop, with an attendance of 85, consisted of series of sessions, each of which began with a presentation followed by small group discussions guided by questions suggested by the meeting organizers. Each group had their own online document where they took notes and recorded short summaries of their conversations. Additionally, there was a poster session that allowed the meeting attendees to share their research, exchange ideas, and find collaborators. A complete report of the workshop is available in the public document titled "Software in Science: A Report of Outcomes of the 2014 National Science Foundation Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) Meeting" available at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/19760
