Impact of a Cyberinfrastructure Enterprise on the Nation's Workforce: Visualizations of a Decade of NCSA's Diaspora

Abstract

Conceived in terms of diaspora, the impact of CI enterprises can be thought of in terms of workforce development, strengthening leading edge industrial knowledge, and building national capabilities. To investigate how we might think through the diaspora of CI enterprises, we conducted a pilot study of one major CI enterprise: the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We compiled and analyzed data from 425 key employees who departed NCSA in the decade from 2003-2013. Often the best way to make sense of complex data involves visualization, and the purpose of this effort was to experiment with visualizations of this diaspora data in an effort to better understand the impact of NCSA’s diaspora.

Keywords: cyberinfrastructure, workforce, impact