Building a climate-sensitive infectious disease community of practice

Wellcome has released a Request for Proposals for up to £2M for up to 5 years.

EDIT: Now live! Apply here.

Following our open call for software for climate-sensitive infectious diseases (CSID) research, Wellcome is now looking for a supplier for a project to create a community of practice around open-source CSID tools.

As this is Wellcome’s first time building a software community of practice, we wanted to write about what we are looking for before the RFP is launched so suppliers have time to find the full specification and submit their applications.

An image from Wellcome’s report on climate-sensitive infectious disease modelling tools.

A bit of background

Wellcome supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone: ensuring no-one is held back by mental health problems, controlling escalating infectious diseases in communities that are most affected, and limiting the harmful effects of climate change on people’s health. At the intersection of these latter two areas is the issue of escalating infectious diseases due to climate change. For example, an increase in vector-borne diseases (such as malaria) due to vectors (such as mosquitos) being able to survive in regions where the temperatures were previously too hostile.

Wellcome commissioned a landscaping report to identify what software tools exist for modelling the relationship between climate and infectious diseases, as well as outlining the challenges that have prevented more accessible tools being developed. We found that two of the biggest barriers to implementation were a lack of effective:

• collaboration between subject matter experts and software developers
• communication between modellers and decision makers

We are looking for a supplier to run a project that helps remove these barriers.

A community of practice

The successful supplier will be provided a budget of £2M to be spent over 3–5 years to build a community of practice around the development of CSID tools. An effective community of practice should:

1. Showcase novel tools in the field of CSID modelling
2. Facilitate better quality open-source research
3. Support more early-stage researchers to engage in software development
4. Ensure existing tools are findable, usable, and do not go to waste
5. Promote best practices in software development, modelling, and development of CSID tools
6. Connect policymakers, researchers, and software engineers to ensure outputs are relevant to end-user needs

We are placing no constraints on the exact mechanism this community of practice should take. As part of the project, the supplier will be expected to landscape similar, existing communities of practice and to select (with justification) their chosen mechanism. Examples of existing mechanisms that may be considered include:

• incorporating a charity to support open-source tools (e.g. NumFOCUS);
• creating a conference (e.g. Keystone Symposia);
• starting a journal (e.g. JOSS);
• convening programming language-specific communities (e.g. rOpenSci).

RFP Details

The RFP is available here, and expressions of interest are due on 23 May. Suppliers will then be evaluated and potentially invited to present a full proposal at the beginning of July. The full timeline with precise dates is available in the RFP document.

We invite anyone interested in being a supplier to read the full RFP and to submit an expression of interest. Please do forward this blog and the RFP to anyone you think may be interested in fulfilling this contract.

We look forward to reading your applications. But if this RFP is not for you then why not have a look at other Wellcome opportunities.