For user facilities
Software for running a user facility’s outside-user program
A research center reports on itself. A user facility has to find outside researchers, work out whether it can do what they are asking, review them, train them, schedule them, and then account for every hour it gave away.
We are building software for that job now, with a small group of facilities.
The problem
Your user program was built for people who already know you
Most facility intake was designed around collaborators. They knew which instrument they wanted, they knew someone on staff, and they could write a proposal in the style your program expects because they had read a dozen of them.
The people you are now asked to reach cannot do any of that. They are at a two-year college, a primarily undergraduate institution, or a small company. They arrive with a question. They do not know your instrument names, and a request form that opens with a three-page project description and biosketches is where they stop.
- They cannot find you
- Your capabilities live in a proposal table and a page of text. Someone searching for the measurement they need has no way to find the instrument that does it, or to tell whether it suits their material.
- The first conversation takes staff time
- Every serious inquiry becomes an email thread with a staff scientist, answering the same twenty questions about sample form, quantity and what the tool can resolve. It is the best part of your service and the hardest to repeat.
- Then you have to report it
- Hours by user category, institutions reached, training delivered, publications that acknowledge the award. All of it rebuilt at the end of the year from calendars and memory, for a report that has to be accepted before the next funding increment arrives.
In design
What we are building
It works alongside the booking system you already have, and covers the steps before a booking and after it. These are the parts we are designing with facilities now.
- Instruments people can search
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Every instrument as a real record: technique, materials it suits, sample form and quantity, what it can resolve, how much time is available, and how long the queue is. The table you already wrote for your proposal, turned into records an outside researcher can search.
- Answering first questions for your staff
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A researcher describes what they are trying to find out, in their own words. They get an answer based on your instrument records: whether you can do it, which instruments apply, and the questions your staff scientist would have asked them anyway. A clear no when the answer is no. Then a request is drafted from what they said, so they do not start from a blank form.
It answers only from your instrument records.
- Review and allocation you can defend
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Requests arrive complete, checked for duplicates and flagged where they need a second look. Your reviewers decide. Every request records what kind of user it came from, so the balance you promised across first-time users, industry and your own people is easy to check.
Declined requests are kept, with reasons. They show you what users want that you cannot yet offer.
- Onboarding with an owner and a date for each step
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Agreements, training, safety clearance, export control and sample shipping, each with an owner and a date, and a reminder when a step is late. You can take a whole group through it after a recruitment workshop, rather than one person at a time.
- Report numbers recorded as you go
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Hours by instrument and by user category, institutions reached and what kind they were, users trained, publications that acknowledge the award, and user satisfaction and what you did about it. Each step above records its own numbers during the year.
Your facility decides its own process: the review steps, who approves, how many user categories you balance across, and what onboarding requires. You set these, and you can change them. No two facilities run this the same way, and many of the facilities starting user programs now have not decided yet.
Who it is for
- Facility and node directors
- You committed to a share of instrument time and a user base you have not met yet. See where both stand, early enough to act.
- User program coordinators
- Every applicant is told to contact you before they submit. That is the most valuable thing you do, and the first thing to suffer when the number of requests grows.
- Outside researchers
- Ask a question in plain language, find out quickly whether this facility is the right one, and get help writing the request.
Who builds it
We built mip.org, the shared site for the Materials Innovation Platforms
SimplyScholar is built by Kaizen. We have built National Science Foundation (NSF) program and center websites since 2016, including mip.org with Penn State, the site the Materials Innovation Platforms (MIPs) share. That work shows us what every platform in the program has to report, and what it is asked for again the next year.
For some individual centers, we have also kept the roster, the publications and the outreach records current between reports.
Become a design partner
We are designing the facility side now, with a small number of facilities that are starting their user programs. Design partners tell us how their intake works, what they need to report, and where the current process loses people.
There is nothing to buy today. Design partners get what they helped design, first.