Conceptualization of a Water Science Software Institute

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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is awarded a grant to develop the concept of a Water Science Software Institute (WSSI) and to create a strategic plan to implement the WSSI. The WSSI mission will be to concurrently transform the research culture and the software culture of the water science community. Water sustainability is an urgent, complex, and trans-disciplinary problem. Complex biophysical and social processes influence water use, quality, and availability. Few research areas have a greater need for modern cyberinfrastructure tools than water science, yet progress on meeting the grand challenge of water sustainability is hindered by insufficient coordination and collaboration among the exceptionally diverse research communities involved and because community-developed software and cyberinfrastructure have not been professionally designed to be interoperable, sustainable, or reusable. This conceptualization phase will use an open community engagement process with assistance from the National Socio-environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), to involve the water science community in activities that simultaneously synthesize input for the strategic plan and serve as prototypes of the processes the Institute will use to achieve its mission. Specifically, the conceptualization grant will fund two synthesis workshops that will define the functional elements of the Institute, a community forum that will present the Institute concept to stakeholder communities for their input, and a software prototyping activity that will demonstrate and evaluate methods for developing a culture of production-quality software engineering within the water science community. Between community engagement activities, the project will produce white papers on the elements of the Institute that will be incorporated into the WSSI strategic plan.The vision for the WSSI is to facilitate the development of sustainable, production- quality cyberinfrastructure that will be used to advance transformative water science. By developing activities that put water scientists, computer scientists, software engineers, and social scientists in the same room with a common purpose, such an institute would drive collaborations that produce innovative ideas and new research. The conceptualization approach will continuously define, test, evaluate, and refine the conceptual model of the Institute in order to produce a strategic plan that serves the needs of the stakeholder communities. This process and its products - the prototype elements of the Institute, the white papers that describe them, and the strategic plan - will advance an understanding of how to form and sustain effective trans-disciplinary collaborations. Software developed as a result of the prototyping activity will be used to advance water science research. Thorough planning will mitigate the risks inherent in standing up the first software institute and will address the challenge of building broad community support to sustain the Institute after NSF funding ends.