OOI and CI teams coming together!

It was a busy week on the OOI CI "main campus" at UC San Diego. All the design leads and senior developers were on the scene, coming together for the first time to discuss the system we are about to build, and plan our next team activity in late June. Later in the week, the entire senior management of the whole OOI met for two solid days (!) to prepare for the National Science Foundation annual review, which will be held in … the same week in late June.

These double-bookings are inevitable on a project with hundreds of participants and a budget of several hundred million dollars. Technical coordination, program coordination, and letting our funders make sure we're doing the 'right things right' means we'll just have to get used to meetings and meeting scheduling issues.

What struck me this week is the quality of the team, and the quality of the collaboration, that is being created.

I remember some of the first meetings between the teams—marine scientists and computer scientists from different institutions and backgrounds, trying to find ways to work together. Tensions ran high on more than a few occasions. You can still see tension, a bit, but the comaraderie and collaborative spirit seems to grow by the week, and I can sense the excitement of putting together this kind of observatory is starting to take over.

Meanwhile, in our Cyberinfrastructure team, we've gone from desperately understaffed to noticeably understaffed, a considerable improvement. (We started this project sooner than was planned, thanks to stimulus funding, and we're still scrambling to catch up.) With all of the key development systems represented by at least one senior developer, the pace has jumped plenty in the last month. The quality of our own CI team is remarkable so far, and everyone is eager to begin rolling out "real software" that will make good science happen.

We'll be hiring more people over the next few months—watch for announcements on this site or on the UCSD job web site, some positions are open as I write this—and that will be exciting too, even if it takes time away from the software work. Putting together the right team to build this kind of system is its own little project, and we're going to get that done as quick as we can. When we're done itsa gonna be sumpin'.