Common use of Objectives for work package 3 – International Science Grid Clause in Contracts

Objectives for work package 3 – International Science Grid. This Week International Science Grid This Week (xxx.xxxxx.xxx) is a free weekly online newsletter that promotes grid computing around the world by sharing stories of grid-empowered science and scientific discoveries. ISGTW was launched in November 2006, and is now produced through a collaboration between GridTalk and Open Science Grid (OSG) in the US. During the first year of GridTalk, 50 weekly issues of iSGTW were produced and after 18 months there are now over 5800 subscribers, a 65% increase since the start of GridTalk. Over the same period, the iSGTW website saw 235,300 page views, with its readership coming from a total of 196 countries. In total 62 separate European projects were covered during the first year, and 46 American projects. The first year reviewers noted the increase in subscribers, and commended the project team’s ‘flexibility and creativity’ in surpassing the original goal of increasing iSGTW subscriptions by 25% in year one “through proactive marketing linked to conference registrations.” Some examples of these marketing materials − posters displayed at events − are shown below. Publicity materials produced for iSGTW for events Although iSGTW is a successful dissemination tool for the multi-science grid projects EGEE and OSG, it is apparent from readership feedback that the appeal of this newsletter lies in its much wider scope and selection of subject matter. The newsletter covers a broad range of national and regional grid projects, as well as related developments in the wider world of distributed computing and supercomputing. During the first year of GridTalk, iSGTW ran two month-long themed series, one on particle physics and the LHC and a second on women in information technology. In an effort to attract and retain readers, iSGTW also covered stories on more unusual topics such as combating real-life, modern day pirates, earthquake prediction in Asia and innovative European art repositories. These stories often prove to be popular with other media outlets, and several have been reprinted in other online publications such as SupercomputingOnline and PhysOrg. Short readership surveys were conducted every six months, confirming that the iSGTW readership is happy with the publication and is keen to see a variety of topics covered, including the applications supported by the grid. To enhance the online profile of iSGTW and to expand its readership, iSGTW set up a Facebook site to act as a community discussion area for beginners to the grid, and launched a forum on the prestigious Nature Networks site, a development that was strongly endorsed by the first year reviewers. Nature Networks is an online scientific community, hosted by the journal Nature, where scientists can keep in touch with colleagues and discuss research and scientific issues. The iSGTW forum was featured on the home page of the Nature Networks site, a page that attracts millions of hits per year. ISGTW also tags articles so that items relevant to particular topics can be extracted from the archives and compiled into themed publications, such as the “EGEE in the iSGTW headlines” publications, produced by EGEE in April 2008, 2009 and 2010. (A screenshot of the iSGTW issue celebrating the launch of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in September 2008 is shown to above). XXXXX is currently produced by a full-time European editor working in close collaboration with a US editor, based at Fermilab. Each editor publishes iSGTW on alternate weeks and reports to an Advisory Board that comprises members of EGEE, CERN, Fermilab and OSG. This has proved to be a highly productive partnership and OSG through TeraGrid has committed to a future phase of GridTalk and iSGTW via a formal Letter of Support accompanying this document. All technical support and maintenance for the iSGTW website is provided by Xenomedia, and all costs for this support are covered by OSG, an arrangement that will continue for the second phase. E-ScienceTalk will continue to fund the iSGTW European editor based at CERN, who will be jointly responsible (with the US editor) for locating stories, researching, interviewing, writing original content, fact-checking, locating illustrations, editing and proofreading each issue of iSGTW, as well as acting as day-to-day webmaster. An important new development for e-ScienceTalk will be a new name for the publication and this will go hand-in-hand with a major redesign and relaunch of the publication. The relaunch will be enabled by a comprehensive upgrade to the underlying web content management system powering the publication, an essential replacement for the current older system. The upgrade will allow for significantly increased functionality, such as the ability to comment on stories and rate them, share stories through social media sites, run surveys and polls of the week and incorporate multimedia content more easily, effectively future- proofing the publication for the duration of e-ScienceTalk. The upgrade will be implemented by Xenomedia, and the one-off costs of this upgrade will be funded equally by OSG and e-ScienceTalk. The relaunch will allow the readers to engage more deeply with iSGTW, building up an active community around the publication. This interactivity will be enhanced by the Nature Network forums, which if successful during GridTalk, will be expanded in the second phase of the project to become a key resource for working scientists to find out more about grid computing and e-Infrastructures and to discuss the issues of the day. A second key advance for iSGTW during e-ScienceTalk, which will be reflected in its new name, will be an expansion of the variety of topics covered. While grid computing will remain at the publication’s core, the impact of technologies such as supercomputing, the network layer, data and cloud computing on grid development and on e-Science will also be covered. This will reflect the current readers’ interest in new and varied topics, a greater proportion of whom are now describing themselves as researchers rather than IT developers. Covering new areas will also help to make the publication appealing to readers from new fields, enabling iSGTW to grow its readership further during e-ScienceTalk by at least 30%. While this expansion in topics is driven by the readers’ feedback, it also seen to be essential by the Advisory Board in order to allow the publication to grow and develop as grid computing and e-Infrastructures themselves develop and become more integrated. This expansion will be supported by additional writing resource that will become available through a collaboration with a new contributor based in Asia, which will be available to e-ScienceTalk as unfunded effort. E-ScienceTalk will also fund an additional post for a Science Writer and Dissemination Officer at CERN who will write for iSGTW, while also making significant contributions to WP1 and WP2. As well as increasing the scope of the topics covered, these additional resources will allow for more exclusive stories and longer, more in-depth, multi-source stories to be produced – something that iSGTW’s readers have consistently asked for in the readership surveys. XXXXX will also seek to recruit a student intern to work on the publication for up to 3 months, based either at CERN, Imperial or QMUL in collaboration with Science Communication degree courses. An internship was completed successfully during GridTalk by a student from the MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College, who advanced the marketing plan and contributed several articles at minimal cost to the project. WP3, led by CERN with input from QMUL and APO, will integrate very closely with the other work packages in e-ScienceTalk. Articles for iSGTW can readily be adapted for use in the GridBriefings produced by WP1, and case studies discussed in the GridBriefings may also lead to full articles in iSGTW. The shared resources area between iSGTW and the GridCafé will continue to expand during e-ScienceTalk, and features and articles written for iSGTW can be included as web content in the GridCafé, GridCast and GridGuide sites.