iPlant Collaborative

What is the iPlant Collaborative?

The iPlant Collaborative (iPC) is a distributed, cyberinfrastructure-centered, international community of plant and computing researchers enabling new conceptual advances through computational thinking and addressing an evolving array of the most compelling grand challenges in the plant sciences and associated, cutting-edge research challenges in the computing sciences. Initially providing services through a small, committed centralized core the Collaborative will gradually become distributed throughout the community. 

The first principle of the iPlant Collaborative – our "prime directive", one might say – is that it must be "by, for and of the community". A second major principle is that the iPC's cyberinfrastructure designs must be driven by specific, compelling, and tractable Grand Challenges in the plant sciences. A third major principle is that the Collaborative must serve the entire breadth of the plant sciences, including ecology, evolution and organismic biology as much as the molecular, cellular and developmental disciplines, and via Grand Challenges integrated across the 'divide', from the molecular to the organismic to ecosystems.

Importantly, the project is NOT based on the idea that "if we build it, they will come." Rather, the plant biology community, together with computing researchers, must first come together and decide what grand challenge questions should drive cyberinfrastructure development. So, the first challenge we face is to engage the community to identify the most compelling and tractable Grand Challenges that require computational approaches and cyberinfrastructure development. [See iPlant's community discussion forum and feel free to contribute your ideas to the discussion of what these GC's ought to be. Four GC workshop proposals have been recommended for support in the fall of 2008 by the Collaborative's Board of Directors.] 

Self-forming Grand Challenge Teams are the most direct way to participate in the iPlant Collaborative. Any group can start a Grand Challenge Team, or propose a Grand Challenge Workshop at which to develop one. GC Teams are central to the iPlant Collaborative because the community through its Board of Directors will choose which Grand Challenges should be prioritized for cyberinfrastructure design and development. Once GC Teams are chosen (our target is 2-4 GCT's before late 2008/early 2009), the iPC's Integrated Solutions Team, led by Lincoln Stein (CSHL) and Sudha Ram (UA), will work with each GCT to design a 'Discovery Environment' to address a particular grand challenge. Successful development of these prototype cyberinfrastructures (Discovery Environments) will require close interaction between IS Team and GC Team members. (See the Grand Challenge Process link and the Supplemental Info link for more details.) GC Team members can participate from anywhere in the world.

To ensure community buy-in and ownership of the Collaborative, an independent Board of Directors has been selected which will set priorities for the allocation of Collaborative resources to particular grand challenges, through a process involving self-forming grand challenge teams that will arise from the community and make proposals to the Board. The PI's will be available to facilitate the efforts of GC teams, but we are agnostic about which grand challenges should be prioritized. To ensure substantial independence, the Board of Directors was appointed through a bootstrapping process, via a Nominating Committee, not by the PI's. One third of the Board will refresh annually, allowing new members of the community to serve. (Members listed under About iPC)

The iPC is funded by the National Science Foundation's Plant Sciences Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative (PSCIC) program in Emerging Frontiers: "The Emerging Frontiers (EF) Division is an incubator for 21st Century Biology. EF supports multidisciplinary research opportunities and networking activities that arise from advances in disciplinary research. By encouraging synergy between disciplines, EF provides a mechanism by which new initiatives will be fostered and subsequently integrated into core programs."