Special Status Report: NSF Core Proposal Planning

March 2018

On Monday, March 5 2018, Unidata Program Center staff gathered at the NCAR Mesa Lab’s Fleischmann Building for a day-long brainstorming retreat. The goal for the day was to generate and refine ideas for ways that Unidata can better serve its community of geoscience researchers and educators, and to expand its reach to new communities that could benefit from Unidata’s activities but currently are not involved.

The brainstorming session took place in the context of the Unidata strategic plan as approved by the Strategic Advisory Committee during the Fall 2017 committee meeting. That plan groups Unidata’s contributions to the community into three broad categories:

• Managing Geoscience Data
• Providing Useful Tools
• Supporting People

Staff began by writing down ideas they felt would provide benefits to the Unidata community and to the program, and grouping the ideas into the strategic plan’s broad categories. This exercise was followed by additional discussion in smaller groups focusing on each of the three areas. The discussion shifted between high-level concepts like

• Unidata serving as a “maker space” or “workbench” that combines geoscience data with tools to analyze that data
• Promoting data access standards for cloud-hosted geoscience data
• Designing general-purpose data transformation tools, to easily convert data from “raw” formats to “useful” formats
• Enhancing Unidata training offerings to better support a 21st century geoscience workforce
• Encouraging more community participation in Unidata activities through internships and “visitor” positions at the Program Center
• Promoting greater community involvement in software development efforts
• “Democratizing” geoscience by creating workflows that are easy for anyone to adopt, lowering resource and experience barriers to doing science

and more technical topics such as

• Which technologies would be best to create web-accessible workflows
• Whether/how existing data services could be recast as “microservices” better suited for cloud environments
• Ways to standardize different web APIs used by different cloud services
• Whether providing pre-built virtual machine images would be an appropriate solution for platform/operating system problems

The ideas generated during the staff workshop are intended to help define the main areas of new activity for next NSF core funding proposal, which we plan to submit in early Fall 2018. The next steps will be to define specific activities and areas of investigation, to suggest the hoped-for outcomes, and concretely outline why these are important for the Unidata community.

 __Word-cloud created from the workshop’s initial brainstorming activity__

Prepared  March 2018