I wanted to share this announcement, which I picked up from Bill St. Arnaud of CANARIE's invaluable CAnet-news list (see http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news). It's an NSF solicitation for Virtual Organizations to support Engineering disciplines and very much part of the overall cyberinfrastructure agenda; however, it's listed on the Engineering page of the NSF web site rather than the Office of Cyberinfrastructure page (at least when I last looked) so some CNI-announce readers may have missed this.  I've reproduced the summary below; full details can be found at:

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=501057&org=ENG&from=home



Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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Engineering Virtual Organization Grants   (EVO)

Program Solicitation
NSF 07-558


    Engineering Virtual Organization (EVO) Grants

Synopsis of Program:

    The primary purpose of this solicitation is to promote the development
of Virtual Organizations (VO's) for the engineering community (EVOs).  A VO
is created by a group of individuals whose members and resources may be
dispersed globally, yet who function as a coherent unit through the use of
cyberinfrastructure (CI).  EVOs will extend beyond small collaborations and
individual departments or institutions to encompass wide-ranging,
geographically dispersed activities and groups. This approach has the
potential to revolutionize the conduct of science and engineering research,
education, and innovation. These systems provide shared access to
centralized or distributed resources, such as community-specific sets of
tools, applications, data, and sensors, and experimental operations, often
in real time.

    With the access to enabling tools and services, self-organizing
communities can create VOs to facilitate scientific workflows; collaborate
on experiments; share information and knowledge; remotely operate
instrumentation; run numerical simulations using shared computing resources;
dynamically acquire, archive, e-publish, access, mine, analyze, and
visualize data; develop new computational models; and deliver unique
learning, workforce-development, and innovation tools. Most importantly,
each VO design can originate within a community and be explicitly tailored
to meet the needs of that specific community.  At the same time, to exploit
the full power of cyberinfrastructure for a VO's needs, research domain
experts need to collaborate with CI professionals who have expertise in
algorithm development, systems operations, and application development.

    This program solicitation requests proposals for two-year seed awards to
establish EVOs.  Proposals must address the EVO organizing principle,
structure, shared community resources, and research and learning goals; a
vision for organizing the community, including international partners; a
vision for preparing the CI components needed to enable those goals; a plan
to obtain and document user requirements formally; and a project management
plan for developing both a prototype implementation and a conceptual design
of a full implementation. These items will be used as criteria for
evaluation along with the standard NSF criteria of Intellectual Merit and
Broader Impacts.  Within the award size constraints, the prototype
implementation should provide proof of concept with a limited number of its
potential CI features.  Successful proposals should expect to demonstrate
the benefits of a fully functional EVO and how it will catalyze both large
and small connections, circumventing the global limitations of geography and
time zones.