Catalyst project
Our goal is to create a community cloud infrastructure service and offer workflow solutions in the life sciences. We will promote open and inclusive community practices as values, the infrastructure enabling these practices, and a “train-the-trainer” approach that empowers leaders of local communities to share their cloud infrastructure expertise with others in their communities. We will focus on communities in Latin America and Africa, and we hope to learn how this model could be extended to other historically marginalized global communities from large-scale scientific infrastructure projects.
This is a collaborative effort between 2i2c, The Carpentries, the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE), Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science (OLS).
Improving the accessibility and usefulness of cloud infrastructure for global communities requires expertise in many areas such as pedagogy, infrastructure, and local knowledge. MetaDocencia is proud to collaborate on this project with 2i2c, OLS, IOI, CSCCE, and The Carpentries, with the goal of bringing together the skills needed to increase access to interactive computing services for open science communities in Latin America and Africa.
By joining the Catalyst Project, the communities will have access to:
- Free interactive cloud computing hub for 1 year
- Technical support and training on maximizing the use of cloud computing resources
- “Train the Trainer” program to learn teaching and pedagogical skills to transfer expertise to your user community
- Training and mentoring in open science to develop good leadership practices for transparent and accessible research
- Translation and contextualization of resources into Spanish for Latin American communities
- Shaping our governance model to help us maintain, scale, and maximize impact
At MetaDocencia, we have the key role of identifying and reaching out to Latin American communities that could benefit from participating in this pilot project. Over the past few months, we have been working on contacting more participants for the project and have had the opportunity to learn more about your work and build bridges. This is crucial for another MetaDocencia project, Community Mapping.
