I think Mike's right about there being different kinds of expertise, and it wasn't our intention in the expertise gap paper to conflate them. Sue Squires, the anthropologist member of the HPCS Productivity Team (who has been interviewing and surveying people in the HPC community), commented on this in a recent email. She's out of town right now, so I'll post that comment for her.

Now as for the mission partners - After having talked to quite a few, I have come to the conlusion that they are not in agreement on the exact nature of the expertise gap although they all agree that there is one. I am reminded of [the blind men and the] elephant. The percieved expertise gap by a mission partner is dependent on the type of projects they undertake and the type of expertise they most need.

No matter what the type of gap - at the system level I believe complexity is the cause.

So we can fix the complexity or we can address each of the expertise domains and try to address the gap at this level.

And yes I think, if we take this second approach, that there are different solutions dependent on the type of expertise gap. Education, appropriate team mix and practices, abstract languages etc. In fact we may have to do this as an intermediate step

The problem is multi faceted and the near term solutions will have to be as well.

At least we are beginning to understand the highly variable nature of the expertise gap.