The workshop for “Building Communities for Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation” brings together the practitioners of software sustainability, including NSF SI2 participants, to discuss issues and challenges of common interest, to formulate responses benefiting the software enterprise as a whole, and working to build a community of software developers, maintainers, supporters, and users.  This workshop also builds concrete affiliations between SI2 projects and other NSF CIF21 projects to help these programs function as coherent providers of cyberinfrastructure in the service of science and engineering research.

This workshop addresses numerous challenges to success with software; for instance, sustaining a community of developers, building a community of users, fostering innovation and transforming innovation into a reliable, high quality component of software, building liaisons/affiliations with other efforts, developing and maintaining software requirements, managing change against an unstable software substrate, targeting innovative new software and hardware platforms; developing mechanisms to train new users and educate the next generations in ways to use software in scientific and engineering discovery, as well as to be developers of the next set of software capabilities, etc.  The workshop will cultivate the software sustainability community, in order to  bring innovative, useable, sustainable software to the user community, as diverse as they are, and to foster even more innovation, both in science and engineering research, as well as in the development of new software to enable better utilization of a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure.

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