User Community Support Team 2013 plans
The 2013 plans of the EGI.eu User Community Support Team recently emerged from our annual appraisals. I would like to share the key elements of this plan with you, so our partners within the NGIs, within projects and communities can see the 2013 focus areas of our Amsterdam-based team of four.
- Increase EGI’s support for portal based Virtual Research Environments that communities develop and operate to interact with EGI’s and with their own platforms. In the next couple of weeks we will finish the final editing of the EGI Science Gateway Primer, and later this year we will work with the SCI-BUS project on availability monitoring for the SCI-BUS Generic Gateway framework.
- Expand the scope of the EGI Applications Database towards “Community Platform” developers, so the middleware product teams from EMI and IGE will be able to choose after May 2013 a new, lightweight engagement mechanism based on the Applications Database.
- Increase the uptake of the Technical Support Services inside NGI and project specific user support teams, by integrating project specific customisation mechanisms into the services, and by providing tutorials and demos about the services at EGI events and via the Web.
- Establish technical collaborations with a number of ESFRI projects. Two of the existing Virtual Team projects, the ‘Technology study for the CTA ESFRI’ and the ‘Collaboration between EGI/NGIs and large ESFRI project ELIXIR’, help us achieving this. EGI.eu’s involvement in ENVRI, BioVel and BioMedBridges helps us reach communities in the environmental and life sciences sectors.
- Work with the EGI Federated Cloud Task Force, and with support groups that already use EGI cloud services, and finalise user support processes and user facing services of the EGI federated cloud platform. Support the EGI-InSPIRE mini-projects that work in this area.
- Develop workflows for multi-national scientific communities using the services of the ER-flow project. Participate in ER-flow’s Application Porting workshop in London, then in the Workflow Community Collaboration Workshop in Manchester.
- Continue discussing within the community the future of user support services after the end of EGI-InSPIRE. Formulate a project that would integrate and extend these services within the EGI Collaboration Platform.
- Lead and support EGI-InSPIRE mini-projects that are active in the ‘Virtual Research Environment’ area, and particularly develop a ‘Massive Open Online Course’ about EGI Platform technologies, and improve EGI portals with Liferay’s Social Office and Synch modules.
