iPlant Collaborative

Coming of age of the iPlant Collaborative: a perspective

iPlant Collaborative Board of Directors*

15 October 2008

The iPlant Collaborative seeks to transform the way Plant Biologists answer questions and collaborate in the data-laden and cross-disciplinary research environment in which we live. The US National Science Foundation initiated funding for iPlant at the end of January 2008. In only nine months the project team and community, who together constitute the Collaborative, have reached a number of important milestones. These include recruitment of a Board of Directors (BoD), a large and widely attended kick-off meeting in April, community submission and BoD review of a first round of workshop proposals in early summer and staffing key roles on the project.

What is iPlant cyberinfrastructure? Broadly defined, it is the set of tools and data needed to tackle grand challenges in plant biology. This will require a range of technologies and expertise enlisted from throughout the science and social science communities: from data processing, storage and analysis methods, through math, modeling, creation of visualization tools. The cyberinfrastructure will enable use of complex computational methods and varied data types by the broadest community of educators, students and scientists possible.

The goals for the collaborative defy easy description because there are no role models in the Biological Sciences. On the technical side, iPlant aspires to create advanced computer tools to help tame the data overload that plagues biologists across subdisciplines, from the organismal and ecological to the molecular scale. It seeks to promote increased interactions across the areas of plant biology and between biologists and those in many other disciplines, including (but not limited to) the broad range of computational sciences. Perhaps the most challenging goal is to help radically transform the way biological problems are approached, shifting from the single laboratory or small collaborating group to community-driven science. This is logistically difficult and requires that participants donate their truly precious time and energy and give up some measure of their research autonomy to define and pursue a set of goals not completely aligned to their current research interests.

The concept of self-forming community groups is at the heart of the iPlant philosophy and operations. The Project Team has an important role in communicating about iPlant, providing guidance and giving technical support to interested parties. They also seek to broaden participation across technical and training domains, institutions and geographies. However, the community has the responsibility to identify grand challenges, data sets, participating community members and cyberinfrastructure needs. The Project Team and BoD place a high value on self-determination, access of all community members to the collaborative and its products and transparency in operations.

The collaborative is currently at what is arguably the most important point of its early evolution, the transition from community-building Grand Challenge Workshops to establishment of teams crafting plans and proposals for Grand Challenge Projects. Each of the five workshops has been organized by a group of dedicated leaders, whose final formal responsibility is to dispassionately summarize the outcomes of the workshop. Once this is completed the community members have the opportunity to organize in any way that they see fit, including the formation of completely new teams working on unanticipated ideas. No one has a monopoly on good ideas and we anticipate that completely unexpected and innovative ideas will emerge. The BoD hopes that strong Grand Challenge Project proposals are received in early winter, but we imagine that some ideas or groups may evolve more slowly.

 *The iPlant Collaborative Board of Directors (BoD; http://iplantcollaborative.org/about-ipc/board-of-directors) is comprised of volunteers representing the areas of biology, mathematics and computational sciences envisioned to be covered by iPlant projects. These individuals are identified by anominating committee consisting of other experts in domain areas of iPlant and these individuals are recruited to the BoD for terms from 18 to 36 months by the iPlant PI (Rich Jorgensen) and BoD Chair (currently Rob Last). The BoD serves as a liaison between the community and the iPlant project. A major role is to advise the project team on major resource allocation issues, including review of proposals for Grand Challenge Workshops and Grand Challenge Projects.