The draft report of the Task Force on Campus Bridging, established by the NSF's Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastucture in early 2009,  is now available for review and comment. This is a substantial report that looks carefully at the interconnections between campus strategies and investments on one side, and national scale initiatives on the other. I've attached the announcement from the Task Force chair below, which provides more detail on the report and ways to submit comments.

Disclosure: I've been priviliged to be able to serve on this Task Force.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

-----------------------------------

To members of the US science and engineering research community generally, and the cyberinfrastructure community in particular,

In early 2009 National Science Foundation's (NSF) Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) charged six different task forces to make strategic recommendations to the NSF in strategic areas of cyberinfrastructure: Campus Bridging; Data; Grand Challenges and Virtual Organizations; High Performance Computing; Software and Tools; and Work Force Development.

A draft report of the Task Force on Campus Bridging is available for reading and for comment at http://pti.iu.edu/campusbridging/

You may comment on this document in one of three ways:
-Write a paper in response to this document that is posted pubicly on this web site
-Make a short comment that goes to the Task Force on Campus Bridging via surveymonkey either with attribution or anonymously.

We will finalize the document on 16 March, so please submit comments before then if you want them considered as the document is finalized. We will leave the opportunity to make comments open until the end of March. All comments sent via SurveyMonkey will be made available to the NSF.

A bit more about campus briding:

The creation of the NSF ACCI Task Force on Campus Bridging was a starting point led to a variety of efforts to collect community input on the topic of campus bridging. The web site http://pti.iu.edu/campusbridging/ brings together information gathered through several activities related to the general theme of Campus Bridging.

In order to define and specify its area of concern, we offer the following two definitions:

Cyberinfrastructure consists of computational systems, data and information management, advanced instruments, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and advanced networks to improve scholarly productivity and enable knowledge breakthroughs and discoveries not otherwise possible. [From the EDUCAUSE and CASC (Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing) joint report on campus cyberinfrastructure, "Developing a Coherent Cyberinfrastructure from Local Campus to National Facilities".]

And

Campus bridging is the seamlessly integrated use of cyberinfrastructure operated by a scientist or engineer with other cyberinfrastructure on the scientist's campus, at other campuses, and at the regional, national, and international levels as if they were proximate to the scientist, and when working within the context of a Virtual Organization (VO) make the 'virtual' aspect of the organization irrelevant (or helpful) to the work of the VO.

There have been significant opportunities for community input into the creation of this report over the last two years. This is the first opportunity to see a full draft of the overall task force report, and will be the last opportunity for the community to comment upon it and help the Task Force improve it before it is submitted for consideration to the NSF ACCI.

Sincerely,

Craig
--
Craig A. Stewart, Ph.D.
Chair, NSF ACCI Task Force on Campus Briding
Executive Director, Pervasive Technology Institute
Associate Dean, Research Technologies
Indiana University