About

 

    Mission

    The mission of the Campus Champions is to foster a dynamic environment for a diverse community of research computing and data professionals sharing knowledge and experience in digital research infrastructure.

    A Community of Practice

    The Campus Champions comprise a thriving community of practice for research computing and data professionals supporting one another by sharing resources, experience, and wisdom. As advocates of local, regional, and national scientific computing resources, Campus Champions serve as promoters of science. Campus Champions include system administrators, outreach coordinators, engineers, researchers, students, and more, collectively strengthening cyberinfrastructure worldwide.

    Cyberinfrastructure Professionals

    A Campus Champion is an employee of, or affiliated with, a college or university (or other institution engaged in research), whose role includes helping their institution's researchers, educators and scholars (faculty, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates, and professionals) with their computing-intensive and data-intensive research, education, scholarship and/or creative activity, including but not limited to helping them to use advanced digital capabilities to improve, grow and/or accelerate these achievements.

    Mentors, Peers, and Students

    Campus Champions peer-mentor each other, to learn to be more effective. The Campus Champion community has a very active mailing list where Champions exchange ideas and help each other solve problems, regular conference calls where we learn what's going on both within the Champions and at the national level, and a variety of other activities.

    In addition to traditional Campus Champions, the Champion Program includes specialized Champions:

    • Student Champions - offering a unique student perspective on the use of digital resources and services
    • Champions Fellows - the Fellows Program partners Campus Champions with Extended Collaborative Support Services (ECSS) staff and research teams to work side by side on real-world science and engineering projects.

    Scientific Computing Advocates: What does a Campus Champion do as a member of the CC Program?

    • Participate in Campus Champions Program information sharing sessions such as the Campus Champions monthly calls and email list.
    • Participate in peer mentoring with other Campus Champions, learning from each other how to be more effective in their research support role.
    • Provide information about national Cyberinfrastructure (CI) resources to researchers, educators, and scholars at their local institution.
    • Assist their local institution's users to quickly get start-up allocations of computing time on national CI resources.
    • Serve as an ombudsperson, on behalf of their local institution's users of national CI resources, to capture information on problems and challenges that need to be addressed by the resource owners.
    • Host awareness sessions and training workshops for their local institution's researchers, educators, students, scholars, and administrators about institutional, national, and other CI resources and services.
    • Participate in some or all of the Campus, Regional, Domain, and Student Champion activities.
    • Submit brief activity reports on a regular cadence.
    • Participate in relevant national conferences, for example, the annual SC supercomputing conference and the PEARC conference.
    • Participate in education, training, and professional development opportunities at the institutional, regional and national level, to improve the champion(s)' ability to provide these capabilities.

    What does the Campus Champions program do for the Campus Champions?

    • Provide a mailing list for sharing information among all Campus Champions and other relevant personnel.
    • Provide the Campus Champions with regular correspondence on new and updated CI resources, services, and offerings at the national level, including but not limited to the XSEDE offerings.
    • Provide advice to the Campus Champions and their institutions on how to best serve the institution's computing- and data-intensive research, education and scholarly endeavors.
    • Provide education, training and professional development for Campus Champions at conferences, Campus Champion meetings, training events, and by use of online collaboration capabilities (wiki, e-mail, etc.).
    • Help Champions to pursue start-up allocations of computing time on relevant national CI resources (currently only XSEDE resources, but we aspire to expand that), to enable Campus Champions to help their local consituents get started quickly on such national CI resources.
    • Record success stories about impact of Campus Champions on research, education and scholarly endeavors.
    • Maintain a web presence and other social media activity that promotes the Campus Champions Program and lists all active Campus Champions and their institutions, including their local institution and its Campus Champion(s).
    • Raise awareness of, and recruit additional institutions and Campus Champions into the Campus Champions Program.
    • Provide Campus Champions with the opportunity to apply for the XSEDE Champion Fellows Program (and aspirationally other programs), to acquire in-depth technical and researcher support skills by working alongside XSEDE staff experts.
    • Provide Campus Champions information to participate in subgroup activities, such as the Regional Champion initiative.

    Become a Champion

    • Write to @email and ask to get involved
    • We'll send you a template letter of collaboration
    • Ask questions, add signatures, send it back, and join the community