Hard Metrics for Soft Skills: Quantifying a Culture of Collaboration

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) was the largest collaborative cyberinfrastructure consortium funded by the National Science Foundation to empower the scientific community to use research computing resources in service of data-driven breakthrough science. Composed of roughly 300 XSEDE collaborators spread across the United States when fully virtual teams were hardly the norm, XSEDE can be considered, by several different metrics, a successful collaboration. Over two years, our team conducted interviews with XSEDE collaborators to determine what made this organization thrive; this poster presents our findings regarding the soft skills highlighted by our respondents and explains the method we used in order to quantify them.