I think one of the more challenging aspects of our positions is getting more adopters and support for our efforts. Whether you are trying to get your first clients or making a case for more resources, it is good to think about how to promote your group.
I’ve been in groups with dedicated resources for this and groups with the facilitation team handle as well. Here are my thoughts:
Dedicated promotions people are worth it. Technical writers, graphics experts, and journalists are great to have on staff. If your group, work with them even if it fills like it’s not as important as the technical side of the group.
Keep notes on users’ successes and reach out to heavy users. Get them to promote themselves through your channels. We focus on issues in our ticket systems, but we don’t think about all the good stuff coming out of clusters. It’s a win-win to know how much research your group is enabling.
Keep records of publications by your users. Do this periodically (and more frequently than you think you should). The user might not think to inform you, but this is a great way to show others your value.
Write about developments that are important to your users. For example, when I was at Georgia Tech, I wrote about changing terminology in Rmpi because a user reached out and let us know we used problematic terms in our documentation. While we made efforts to change our documentation and reached out to the developers (since we did it to align with their terminology), I also wrote a newsletter to inform our users about the issue and what was being done to address it. While this was probably not that important to most of our users, it was essential to those who were impacted. Every heart and mind is worth working for; since you don’t know which users could be your most prominent advocate (or adversary)!
I’d like to see other people opinions and suggestions
Give talks and encourage your community to do the same. If the talks are recorded, collect them together with links to videos and slides (e.g. DataverseTV). If all you have is slides, that’s better than nothing! Collect those slides together as well and showcase them on your website.
Thanks for the post and for sharing your ideas! This is a challenge that I’m working on at my university right now. I’m part of a brand-new cyberinfrastructure group and we have a new cluster that we got significant investment in and are working on getting adoption for it.
Seeing your suggestions is encouraging because we’re already hitting items 2-4 pretty well. With that said, I think I will focus on the first item because it’s something I’ve overlooked until now. Being a brand-new group, we don’t have the budget for dedicated staff, but we do know individuals with these skills in our parent division that might be open to collaborating with us.
Our approach is to go out and get the “Yelp reviews” to encourage others to trust us with their needs. I think trust is a major component to adoption and the best promotion you can get is the word-of-mouth recommendation from a satisfied client.
Something that I have seen that can also be helpful is to conduct tutorials. For example in my school at Virginia Tech, The Advanced Research Computing center conducts regular tutorials on GPUs, Python, R and different computational tools. I got to know about them first through this kind of tutorials.
By far the most successful method we’ve used is to get a button in our campus’s webform for the internal routing paperwork for grant proposals, saying whether they plan to use our organization’s CI resources (with a link to descriptions of those resources). For every single grant proposal at our campus, the PI has to choose whether to click this button. If they click this button, they and we get an auto-email about our CI organization, and we follow that up with boilerplate documents for Facilities, Data Management Plan (physical part), a description of our broader impact activities, and a template letter of collaboration, all of which can be used in their proposal. But more importantly, anyone who submits even a single grant proposal is aware we exist, and if they’re interested, they can trivially discover what resources we offer.
We have recently implemented a similar process where, during the proposal submission stage, we may get involved in an ancillary review process. This review process is triggered based on a questionnaire response submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI). We ask PIs about their potential need for advanced computing, data management plan, cloud computing, storage resources, etc. Based on the response with the PI we share information via email of different resources available internally or nationally (e.g. the ACCESS ecosystem) and how we can support/facilitate the PIs with the appropriate CI (cyberinfrastructure). We may proactively provide consulting on various topics as needed.
We also conduct a comprehensive advanced computing workshops program; with a specific workshop describing all the CI resources/services available for the researchers via different organizations in the university. This has helped our cause immensely.
We rely on word-of-mouth recommendations by consistently delivering excellent service and actively seeking feedback to maintain our high level of excellence.