The iPlant Collaborative (iPC) is a distributed, cyberinfrastructure-centered, international community of plant and computing researchers enabling new conceptual advances through computational thinking and addressing an evolving array of the most compelling grand challenges in the plant sciences and associated, cutting-edge research challenges in the computing sciences. Initially providing services through a small, committed centralized core the Collaborative will gradually become distributed throughout the community.
The first principle of the iPlant Collaborative – our "prime directive", one might say – is that it must be "by, for and of the community". A second major principle is that the iPC's cyberinfrastructure designs must be driven by specific, compelling, and tractable Grand Challenges in the plant sciences. A third major principle is that the Collaborative must serve the entire breadth of the plant sciences, including ecology, evolution and organismic biology as much as the molecular, cellular and developmental disciplines, and via Grand Challenges integrated across the 'divide', from the molecular to the organismic to ecosystems.
Importantly, the project is NOT based on the idea that "if we build it, they will come." Rather, the plant biology community, together with computing researchers, must first come together and decide what grand challenge questions should drive cyberinfrastructure development. So, the first challenge we face is to engage the community to identify the most compelling and tractable Grand Challenges that require computational approaches and cyberinfrastructure development. [See iPlant's community discussion forum and feel free to contribute your ideas to the discussion of what these GC's ought to be. Four GC workshop proposals have been recommended for support in the fall of 2008 by the Collaborative's Board of Directors.]
Self-forming Grand Challenge Teams are the most direct way to participate in the iPlant Collaborative.
Acknowledgements: The iPlant Collaborative is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation Plant Cyberinfrastructure Program(#EF-0735191).
