Why communication is at the heart of user support at EGI
The Amsterdam-based User Community Support Team works together with the NGI User Support Teams on mapping out the European scientific landscape. User support officers in the Netherlands and in other countries engage with scientific communities at different levels to understand their links to European colleagues, to capture, to analyse and to circulate or directly resolve their e‑Infrastructure needs. Does your scientific community want to know more about distributed computing technologies? Do you want to access an EGI-based scientific calculation? Would you like to talk to experts about how to speed up your scientific code? Do you want to share resources through the European Grid with your partners? Get in touch with the User Support Team within your NGI!
- The EGI Requirement Tracker system is used to capture users’ requirements by scientific communities and by NGI User Support Teams. More than two hundred demands are already stored in this system and solutions to many are emerging from the discussions hosted within the same system.
- The Training registry is used by NGIs to inform communities about upcoming EGI-related training courses. Courses have been delivered in more than 30 countries during 2010.
- Reporting forms are offered for trainers and for trainees to capture best practices, successful or less successful initiatives during training courses. Event summaries prepared from these reports are shared with our partners.
- Several thousand slideshows, video and audio tutorials and presentations are available under open source licences in the EGI Digital Library. NGIs continuously expand the library as new software is introduced within the EGI system.
- Information about grid-enabled scientific applications, reusable support tools and about application developers is stored within the EGI Application Database. This is where NGIs and user groups can register their applications, provide details of support experts and can integrate application and developer profiles into community-specific portals and user environments.
- The User Community Coordination section of the EGI Wiki system provides scratch spaces for communities to develop documents, descriptions and manuals collaboratively, before making these entities visible to the general public through the EGI User Support website.
- The latest information about user support processes and services is shared with the community through this EGI blog. NGI User Support Teams and scientific communities are encouraged to read the posts and to become bloggers.
Are these communication services enough and sufficient to reach our goals? We hope, but we cannot be sure. That’s why the User Community Support Team recently contacted their counterparts in the NGIs with a survey and asked them ‘how else can communication be further improved?’. Because it’s all about communication...
