Mission statement

Motivation

Many researchers create tools that could be very valuable to a broader audience. Using them, however, is often impeded by the required expertise and/or effort.
This project aims at providing services to all of DTU Compute to help them make their tools and available to the world.

Goal

Our goal is to reach out to science and industry to promote the use of the tools and datasets we have created, and thus advance scientific progress at large and its economic dissemination.
On a smaller scale, the individual stakeholders each will benefit in turn:

  • Compute will benefit from increased visibility and newly established contacts and created collaboration opportunities.
  • The sections will benefit by having more insight into the activities of other sections.
  • Individual researchers can benefit by more citations and higher visibility.
Offering

To this end, we will provide or broker the following services:

  • IT services (hosting, deployment, source code repository usage, issue tracking, ticketing/helpdesk, …)
  • consulting (software engineering, productization, technologies, re‐engineering,…)
  • marketing support (creation of web pages, logos/icons, branding, CI, polishing, …)
  • dissemination and distribution support (manuals, online‐help systems, tutorials, video clips, …)
  • maybe development services (re‐Engineering, UI make‐over, system audit/inspection/assessment, …)
  • maybe help with legal and staffing issues (licensing issues, getting better access to student helpers, …)

With this initiative in place, there will be a unique point of contact if you want to better promote your research software and data sets.

Disclaimer

That said, we have to point out the limitations and restrictions of this initiative.

  • We only do what we are good at, so we may not (yet) cover your technology/platform.
  • We gladly help you, but we don’t do your work for you: without your passion and engagement, we cannot do it.
  • We have limited resources, so we decide ourselves what we believe is the most promising project.
  • We would like to include data sets in our scope, but, sadly, we are unable to do it at this point.
Next Steps

In the immediate future (January 2015 to mid‐2015), we

  • We will launch a broad scale census of tools and datasets and compile the results into the Compute Tools&Data Sets Inventory (CTDSI), which will be made available online.
  • Informed by the initial survey results, we will select a small representative set of lighthouse projects to be presented as show‐cases, and work on these first.
  • We will report on the progress of the project, and announce its results as widely as possible to attract more interest, in particular within DTU at large, to secure future funding.

By mid‐2015, we should have collected some experience with our light‐house projects, so we know by then, how to best do it. We will use this experience to adjust our approach and broaden the scale of featured tools (budget permitting).
In the more distant future (maybe starting in mid‐2016), we plan to expand again. Hopefully, by that time, we have attracted additional funding from various sources (DTU, other institutes, EU projects at DTU, industry, …), so that we can broaden the scope of services offered to also provide developmental activities (i.e., programming, reengineering) for science‐heavy applications. At this stage and under the condition of sufficient external funding, our initiative can evolve into a unit that acts similar to a commercial software house, but specialized on scientific software and data sets.

Call for Action

As said before, we can only succeed through the active participation of as many members of Compute as possible! Thus, we are asking you to:

  • Provide information about any research tools and /or data sets you think might be useful to third parties through our online survey.
  • If you apply for money, include a dissemination part and sub‐contract these activities to us.
  • Anything else