We are excited to share that the grant proposal that the IOI team contributed to, titled "A Collaborative Interactive Computing Service Model for Global Communities", has been awarded funding by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

This announcement may be cross-posted on the websites of several collaborating organizations of this grant, including 2i2c and Open Life Science. Para leer este post en español, vea el blog de MetaDocencia.

The goal of this proposal is to create a collaborative cloud infrastructure service that enables community-based cloud-native workflows in the biosciences. Together with our collaborators, we will promote values of open and inclusive community practices, infrastructure that enables these practices, and a “train-the-trainers” approach that empowers community leaders to share expertise in cloud infrastructure with others in their communities. Our focus will be on communities in Latin America and Africa, and we hope to learn how this model could be extended to other global communities that are historically marginalized from large-scale scientific infrastructure projects.

This is an opportunity for IOI to test out putting our research into practice. As part of this proposal, we will conduct initial research in governance activities and design an early-stage governance and sustainability plan, which will be piloted by project teams and participating community members. Through co-designing, refining, and iteratively developing this governance and sustainability model with the participating communities, we not only motivate participating teams and individuals to reflect more deeply about governance and power dynamics within their own communities and networks and maximize their learnings, but also build co-ownership into the resulting model and encourage its reuse and further generalization in the long-term by other projects, advancing the state of knowledge and experience with more robust, inclusive, and engaging governance structures that will provide the necessary ingredients for long term viability. At the conclusion of the project, IOI will provide a summary of findings documenting the initial plan and the lessons identified in the course of the project, and share openly a final set of recommendations for further reflection and development.

This is a collaborative effort between 2i2c, The Carpentries, CSCCE, Invest in Open Infrastructure, MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science. This work is currently funded for two years (2023-24). For more detailed information, see the blog post with our full grant narrative.

We are hiring

As a part of this effort, our collaborators will be hiring new members to their teams! There are currently two job postings open:

  • Cloud infrastructure engineer to join 2i2c’s Site Reliability Engineering team that will operate and support the cloud infrastructure in this project.
  • Programme manager role to join Open Life Science and support this project via project management and operational support.

We may be hiring for other positions related to this effort, so please stay tuned for more information if you are interested.

Where to follow along

If you’d like to follow along with this work, please share your e-mail address in this short form (Note: this form is not managed by IOI). We’ll send updates as we work out longer-term spaces for communication or documentation.

Social media image by Anh Tuan To on Unsplash.

Posted by Emmy Tsang