CaRCC/RCD Nexus 2022 Retrospective

By Daphne McCanse, Communications and Engagement for RCD Nexus, CaRCC

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Greetings, research computing and data (RCD) professionals! As we usher in the New Year, CaRCC and RCD Nexus would like to take a moment to look back on and celebrate some of our community’s exciting accomplishments in 2022: 

To formalize and ensure community input and evaluation, CaRCC formed a new Advisory Committee and held its first annual meeting in January 2022. The group consists of 12 members selected for their leadership and expertise within the broader RCD and cyberinfrastructure landscape. The group is instrumental in long-term planning as CaRCC continues a period of rapid growth. 

We ramped up the work of our RCD Nexus NSF Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence (CI CoE) pilot grant and began to provide more resources than ever before to both the CaRCC and the broader RCD community. The RCD Nexus website currently serves as the CaRCC Career and Resource Center. 

In May 2022, CaRCC activity leaders, advisory committee members, and peers from across the RCD community met in Denver and joined remotely for a Strategic Planning Meeting. The meeting included a discussion around CaRCC’s role in defining a framework for an RCD-CI professional society.

CaRCC has helped to facilitate the RCD Community Builders Group, a collaborative effort among nine RCD-CI organizations working together to support the community at large. The group has been meeting monthly since March 2022. Additionally, CaRCC has formalized a partnership and collaboration with the CASC organization and had two meetings and presentations during which the groups discussed opportunities for collaboration. 

The CaRCC People Network continues to see significant growth in membership, with a 22% increase in email list members in 2022, and a 54% increase in Slack members, bringing the total membership to more than 1,300 people. Several tracks have increased their activities, and the Emerging Centers track established a formal steering committee. A Strategy and Policy-Facing track launched in September. 

The RCD Capabilities Model and assessment tool completed its second annual Community Dataset in late 2021, with 51 institutions contributing data. The published report and analysis were released in 2022, with more than 450 unique views and 346 downloads as of December 2022. The third survey closed in December 2022 increasing the total number of assessments to 81. A set of institutions in EPSCoR jurisdictions leveraged the RCD Capabilities Model to assess shared gaps and challenges; the EPSCoR CI Workshop Working Group published an analysis of this data and hosted a workshop to explore the themes at the national EPSCoR meeting in November 2022.

July was an especially exciting month. Preceding the PEARC22 conference in Boston, RCD Nexus Day brought together more than 80 participants from institutions across the US and Canada to discuss a range of topics including ideas for a new set of “Focused Tools” for the RCD Capabilities Model and issues and practices for student and staff workforce development. These discussions led to the formation of a new committee within the RCD Capabilities Model Working Group and a set of paired interest groups on the Staff and Student Workforce. 

CaRCC also hosted a workshop on Strategic Planning for RCD Professionals and held a CaRCC Town Hall during PEARC22. The RCD Career Arcs Working Group’s paper, “Understanding Factors that Influence Research Computing and Data Careers” was awarded Best Full Paper, Workforce Development, Training, Diversity, and Education, as well as the Phil Andrews award. The RCD Professionalization Working Group presented on the 2021 Workforce Survey, at PEARC22 in “Characterizing the US Research Computing and Data (RCD) Workforce”. 

It was a big year for the EPSCoR CI Working group, which produced a 2022 report that summarizes EPSCoR assessment results to date. An online Spring Preliminary Workshop in March 2022 gathered input from the community that was used to prioritize presentations given at the NSF EPSCOR conference in Portland, Maine in November. 

The Decadal Survey Interest Group was active in 2022, adding new members to increase diversity and breadth, drafting a charter, and completing surveys and focus groups to gather the information that assists RCD leadership in strategic planning. 

We know this is only a small number of the accomplishments made by our Working and Interest groups, in 2022. We are grateful for everyone in the vibrant, active CaRCC/RCD Nexus community that continues to grow, learn from and support each other.

We can’t wait to see what 2023 will bring! Happy New Year!

This story was originally posted on the CaRCC website: https://carcc.org/2023/01/09/carcc-rcd-nexus-2022-retrospective/