Collaboration, Contributed by Organizations or Campuses, and Resource Sharing

This report is based primarily on a workshop involving 42 people from academia and industry.
The goal of the workshop was to share systematic knowledge about the components, characteristics,
practices, and transformative impact of effective VOs; identify topics for future research that will
inform the ongoing design, development, and analysis of VOs for science and engineering research
and education; and create a new cross-disciplinary VO research community to conduct research across
a range of important topics. A subsequent workshop brought together more than 200 practitioners and
VO researchers to discuss how to build effective virtual organizations, and some of the material from
that workshop is represented here.

The author describes in this paper the creation and operation of the Open Science Grid (OSG [1]), a distributed shared cyberinfrastructure driven by the milestones of a diverse group of research communities. The effort is fundamentally collaborative, with domain scientists, computer scientists and technology specialists and providers from more than 70 U.S. universities, national laboratories and organizations providing resources, tools and expertise. The evolving OSG facility provides computing and storage resources for particle and nuclear physics, gravitational wave experiments, digital astronomy, molecular genomics, nanoscience and applied mathematics. The OSG consortium also partners with campus and regional grids, large projects such as TeraGrid [2], Earth System Grid [3], Enabling Grids for E–sciencE (EGEE [4]) in Europe and related efforts in South America and Asia to facilitate interoperability across national and international boundaries.

OSG’s experience broadly illustrates the breadth and scale of effort that a diverse, evolving collaboration must undertake in building and sustaining large–scale cyberinfrastructure serving multiple communities. Scalability — in resource size, number of member organizations and application diversity — remains a central concern. As a result, many interesting [5] challenges continue to emerge and their resolution requires engaged partners and creative adjustments.

Many small, undergraduate colleges aspire to similar curricular goals yet lack opportunities to share resources in ways that could help them meet these common goals. These campuses go it alone by choice or for lack of information about others' solutions to their common challenges. Consortia have made progress in sharing administrative services; curricular collaboration is much more difficult in a context where faculty members work independently and are evaluated as individuals. Curricular wheels are reinvented when faculty on neighboring campuses develop similar course materials. Less commonly taught languages remain out of the reach of many small campuses. Students compromise on electives when faculty members take sabbatical leaves. Opportunities to enhance learning are often missed.

On the other hand, technologies that facilitate communication and collaboration, many of which are basic and reliable, allow our faculties to work more closely on curricular projects to the benefit of our students.

It will detail a new model specific to content development and/or profession/instructional development that permit recursive capabilities to technology, tools and content. This model permits the reuse, multipurposing and repurposing of existing content. It is being realized within the Flex-EC initiative led by the Alberta Online Consortium, including collaboration and sharing among fourteen partners within the K-12, post-secondary and corporate context.