Behind the Curtain at TCG

TCG’s NITRC Team Launches Cloud-based Science Research Platform on Amazon Web Services Marketplace

TCG announced today that the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse Computational Environment (NITRC-CE) is now available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. NITRC-CE offers neuroscience researchers the convenience, speed, and savings of cloud-based computing against public and private neuroinformatics data sets. 

TCG’s NITRC team developed NITRC-CE to support neuroscientists wishing to pay only for the computational power needed to do their research, and scale the computational resources needed to the size of the research challenge at hand. Using the computational power of the Amazon cloud, NITRC-CE helps minimize the digital divide between researchers at institutions with high performance compute services and those with more modest resources and budgets. Click here to read the full news release.

TCG’s Tchad Moore Named NITAAC Contract Communications CAG Co-chair

TCG business development executive Tchad Moore has been selected as co-chair of the Communications Community Action Group (CAG) for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Technology Assessment and Acquisition Center (NITAAC). NITAAC operates several government-wide acquisition contracts, including CIO-SP3 Unrestricted, CIO-SP3 Small Business (CIO-SP3 SB), and ECS3. TCG is a prime on CIO-SP3 SB.

The Communications CAG is one of four internal committees that provide input to NITAAC as it aims to support agencies’ IT acquisitions across the government. The Communications CAG’s objective is to improve NITAAC’s education, communications, and outreach with Federal agencies, and to ensure open communications among NITAAC officials, customers, and contract holders. Click here to read the full press release.

NIH Awards CIO-SP3 SB Prime Contract to TCG

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Technology Assessment and Acquisition Center (NITAAC) has awarded TCG a 10-year contract with a ceiling of $20 billion to provide health IT and other IT-related support services under its Chief Information Officer-Solutions & Partners 3 Small Business (CIO-SP3 SB) multiple award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite quantity, government-wide acquisition contract. TCG was one of 79 small businesses awarded the coveted contract. For more information about TCG’s CIO-SP3 SB contract go to: http://www.tcg.com/ciosp3. To read the full press release, click here.

TCG’s Tchad Moore Recognized by AFCEA Bethesda

TCG’s Tchad Moore has been recognized by the Bethesda Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA Bethesda) for his contributions in helping set a fundraising record for the group’s annual gala to benefit The Children’s Inn at the National Institutes of Health. AFCEA Bethesda is a non-profit that promotes partnerships between government and industry and The Children's Inn is a private, family-centered “place like home” for children participating in medical research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Families stay together free of charge no matter how long the treatment. The Children’s Inn Gala is the largest fundraiser for The Inn. As the flagship charity of AFCEA Bethesda, The Children’s Inn Gala has donated $5 million to the Inn over the last 14 years. Click here to read the full press release.

ORCID Proposes Unique Identifiers For Scientific Authors

Uniquely identifying  people in an electronic database can be a very hard problem.  I ran into this problem on my first project with TCG and it has come up a number of times since then.  Given a large enough sample size, you can find multiple people with the same name sharing the same birthdate.  This can give you false matches where you think two records are actually about the same person, but really are not. You can try to add additional information into your algorithm, but as the pool of data grows larger you will continue to find incorrect matches.  I have even read about people having the same name, birthday and Social Security Number...which is supposed to be a unique government identifier in the United States.

Nature has an article online describing the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) system to provide a unique identifier for scholarly authors.  It will help people identify exactly which person wrote an article and allow you to reliably find all their other publications without getting incorrect matches.  I don't know if it is in the plan now, but I hope it can also be used to simplify data entry and reduce errors there.  

Of course, only time will tell if ORCID becomes a success.  As an IT professional working with grant management and scentific collaboration, I hope this works out.  It is a real problem and will only become harder to deal with as the size of our electronic databases and human population grow.   

TCG’s Nina Preuss Is a Women In Technology Leadership Award Finalist

TCG project manager Nina Preuss has been named by Women In Technology (WIT) as one of 49 finalists for its 13th Annual Leadership Awards. The awards honor women who have excelled as mentors, leaders, and role models in the Washington, DC technology industry. Ms. Preuss is one of five finalists in the Public Sector (Small Business) category. To read the full press release, click here.

How To Build an Online Community

One key to the success of the NITRC web site is the strong community support we have from it's target audience: neuroscience researchers.  This didn't happen overnight.  There were a lot of steps that led up to where we are now, and a few mis-steps that we had to fix too.  But the good news is that we managed to build a community that works both for its members and it's sponsors at the NIH.

Building online communities is a hard problem.  In addition to all the typical difficulties you will encounter building a web site, you also have a "chicken or egg" situation when attracting your early users. People generally don't want to join your site if there isn't some critical mass of people already there. Then once they do join, the problems aren't over.  Now you have to keep all your friendly, productive users and try to discourage the trolls.

You might also have other goals than just keeping people active in your community.  For many commercial sites, this might be selling advertising or site subscriptions.  For a non-profit, the actual goal of the site owner is likely furthering its mission. Finding the right balance between those goals and keeping the community happy can be difficult.

I try to be a metric driven person. I don't play the lottery in real life, and I don't like to gamble on how implementing a new feature will affect our on-line community.  With NITRC we try to model our site improvements on other successful communities.  It's not a perfect solution, but it is better than trying to make a guess.  

This is why I am so glad to be reading Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design by Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick. The link above takes you to Dr. Kraut's home page where, as of now at least, he is kindly providing PDF versions of a number of chapters.  Kraut gives both theory and empirical evidence to show how various changes to an on-line community will most likely affect it.  Much of the design advice in the book is backed up by real world examples.  I have seen many of the web sites and features he is pointing out, but I haven't always had a deep understanding of what effects these features have on the site's on-line community.

If you are building an on-line community you really owe it to yourself to give this book a read. If it saves you from implementing one ill-fated feature request, you will have a positive return on your time.  It's also good for the intellectually curious: Anyone who is curious why Facebook is worth Billions but so many similar sites have faltered will find some answers here.  Hope you enjoy it.

NIH Awards NITRC Phase II Contract to TCG

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded TCG a four-year contract to continue its support of the award winning Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC), a user-friendly collaboration environment for the neuroinformatics community. This support will allow NIH to enhance and expand NITRC’s scientific scope and add new types of resources. To read the full press release, click here.

NITRC Now Acccepting Externally-Issued Identity Credentials in Advance of Government Directive

NITRC--the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse--recently promoted code to allow for externally-issued identity credentials one week before Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel instructed federal agency CIOs to begin accepting non-government, externally-issued identity credentials. The ability to link a Google ID account to a NITRC log-in was included in TCG's September 2011 release. TCG built and operates NITRC for NIH. Under this contract, TCG established a web-based clearinghouse for neuroimaging analysis tools, vocabularies, datasets, and databases to facilitate the dissemination of these resources and the discussion of needs and limitations. The site provides opportunities for community comment on neuroimaging informatics knowledge resources to guide development and enhance their use by the research community. The NITRC initiative also offers a framework for other scientific areas: tools and resources created under Federal grants for scientific research in any specialty can be shared with scientific communities using the NITRC approach. For more details on NITRC, see our case study on TCG's web site.

FDP Fall General Meeting Registration Now Open

The Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), which is an association of federal agencies, academic research institutions, and research policy organizations that works to streamline the administration of federally sponsored research has announced that registration for the FDP Fall General Meeting, September 14-16, 2011 is now open and will close Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 5:00pm. It will reopen on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 3:00pm for on-site registration with the higher onsite registration fees.  Please click here to register for the meeting. For any questions regarding online registration, please contact Claudette Baylor-Fleming at cbaylor@nas.edu or at (202) 334-3994. Please click on the follow links for frequently asked questions:  General FDP FAQ or Mentoring Program FAQ.