iPlant Collaborative

 
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The iPlant Collaborative: what potential does it have for advancing plant science?

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 wiki and the meeting wiki (links at left) and feel free to contribute your ideas to the discussion of what these GC's ought to be.

Self-forming Grand Challenge Teams are the most direct way to participate in the iPlant Collaborative.

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iPC Kickoff Conference

The iPlant Collaborative held its inaugural conference "Bringing Plant and Computing Scientists Together to Solve Plant Biology's Grand Challenges" at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from the evening of April 7 to afternoon April 9, 2008. [Program] .

The purpose of this conference was to 1) explain the nature of the project and 2) facilitate community discussion of what are the most compelling grand challenges, as well as the data, computational tools, and cyberinfrastructure necessary to solve those grand challenges. Attendance in person is not essential to project participation (see Grand Challenge Process and About iPC tabs for information on the project and participation in it (as well as "Director's Log").

Over 190 people registered and attended the conference. [Registration List]

Participation in person was balanced as much as possible among disciplines, both within and between the computing sciences and the plant sciences (including evolution, ecology, and organismic biology, as well as the molecular, cellular and developmental disciplines), as well as by type of institution, geography, underrepresented minorities, etc. International participation was encouraged.

 
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Director's Log

Cyberdate: March 10, 2008

Our responsibility is to be a transparent organization that is by, for, and of the community

Thus, we are happy to provide several background documents of interest at the tab above, Supplementary Information. We hope the community will find this information helpful and informative. Please note that the "controlling" document is the final one - early docs were part of the process, but revised at each stage in accordance with reviews, site visit and NSF policies and requests. 

1. Our PSCIC proposal,  

"The iPlant Collaborative: A Cyberinfrastructured- Centered Community for a New Plant Biology"

2. Answers to questions posed by the site visit team.

3. A powerpoint presentation based on what we presented at the site visit 

4. Additional information provided to NSF after the site visit

5. Our Cooperative Agreement with NSF (Programmatic Terms and Conditions) 

Past logs here
 
March 9, 2008

Is there anything outside the mission of the iPlant Collaborative? It seems so broad....

Data collection is one major activity that is not within our remit. If Grand Challenges require new data, Grand Challenge Teams will need to raise external funds to collect those data.  The iPC will work with GC Teams to design and build prototype cyberinfrastructures (Discovery Environments) to specifications necessary to solve Grand Challenges, but these Grand Challenges must be tractable, i.e., the necessary data must be available and of sufficient quality to be useful to solve the Grand Challenge, and the necessary computational tools must exist. Thus, we also are not funded to carry out novel, long term, computing research. No doubt, other researchers will identify new, cutting-edge research problems through the Grand Challenge Identification process and will obtain funding to develop novel computational approaches that will ultimately benefit plant biology, but the iPC is not permitted to fund such longer term research. We intend to encourage and facilitate such funding efforts, whether for new data collection or computing research. 
 

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