Campus Bridging in the Age of COVID-19.

Since 2015, the XSEDE Cyberinfrastructure Resource Integration (XCRI) team has engaged in a series of on-site visits of various types with institutions wishing to implement research computing resources in a way that gains from the lessons learned by larger XSEDE Resource Providers. The team originally developed a variety of flexible toolkits for such institutions, with the intent that they could be picked up at will and used to bootstrap local research computing programs by interested folks. In practice, the real value provided by the XCRI has proven to be the deep side-by-side work, mentorship, and focus on relationship building that comes along with carrying out a site visit. While the in-person aspect of these visits ceased of necessity beginning in 2020, activities continued in a distributed fashion, which proved to be a boon for several reasons. This paper provides an overview of the site visit process, and an exploration of the deep benefits of these remote collaborations, which are an efficient way to spread RCD knowledge to under-resourced institutions.