The initial idea for a science gateway is often driven by requirements in research and/or teaching. The knowledge about implementing an extensible, scalable, easy-to-use and sustainable science gateway is not necessarily in the knowledge portfolio of the researcher behind the idea though. On the developing side, someone knowledgeable in creating science gateways is not necessarily an expert in the research area serviced by an envisioned science gateway. The close collaboration between researchers and science gateway creators is crucial to gather all necessary information and requirements on a science gateway. This is usually an underestimated design task and the exact layout for the science gateway is a continuous and iterative process with suggestions from developers for the layout and feedback and comments from the user community. While each community and its requirements on a science gateway are unique, the questions, which need to be answered for planning and designing a specific science gateway are very similar the same independent of the domain. The panel will discuss effective checklists to support developers to communicate with diverse domain experts. Such checklists can be the basis to create a good start for a Software Requirement Specification for an envisioned science gateway. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sandra Gesing Associate Research Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Computational Scientist, Center for Research Computing University of Notre Dame http://www3.nd.edu/~sgesing ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------