HSF Working Groups are community led groups that organise activities in particular domains with the aims of increasing communication between developers, providing a platform for discussion of interesting problems and novel solutions developments, and fostering the adoption of common software between different communities.
Working groups have three conveners, to help share the workload, and are appointed by the HSF (via an open nomination process and a search committee) to serve for one year, with renewal possible by mutual agreement. (In contrast, interest groups and activity areas are less formal.)
We strive for a diverse representation in the HSF working groups and, in particular, we very strongly favour having conveners from three different experiments.
If you want to form a working group, or want to put some community-wide activity under the umbrella of the HSF, just contact the HSF coordination team.
Working Groups are added to the website of the HSF, with description and contact information, and their own Indico category.
The HSF is extremely grateful to members of the community who take on the role of convener in the working groups - thank you. Each working group engages with a different subset of the developer and physics community and thus the exact pattern of activities that are organised can vary. It is delegated to the conveners to decide the way to organise so that it best serves the needs in HEP software and computing as required. That said, organising an event every 4 to 6 weeks is usually a good cadence, although sometimes a series of related events might happen bunched together more tightly, e.g., looking at one specific topic from the point of view of several experiments.
HSF Working Group meetings in general should try to:
We strongly encourage the use of common software in the HSF and opportunities for common development and sharing should be seized when they exist. The HSF exists as a GitHub organisation and is happy to host projects to help them grow. This can include things like common datasets used in development as well as actual code.
One focus that we encourage is to organise events together with other groups, e.g., a special session at a workshop, a joint meeting with a software development project, a cross-cutting topic that bridges more than one HSF working group (our working groups are not intended to be silos). These meetings are excellent for bringing together people that might not normally talk or know each other.
Our working group conveners should usually dedicate between 5% and 10% of their time to running the working group. More than 10% is great, but we recognise that people are busy with many other tasks. Less than 5% and the working group can fall into an inactive state. Conveners should meet at least once a month to plan. The HSF Coordination Group is always happy to attend to give feedback and suggestions.
At least one of the working group conveners should attend the bi-weekly HSF Coordination Meetings and give a short update on the group’s recent and forthcoming activities.
When the HSF organises workshops working group conveners can give input to the organising team. If there will be a session dedicated to the activities of any working group then conveners will be asked to co-organise it.
In general, recording is appropriate for HSF meetings, which are there to foster discussion and collaboration, so we do recommend it. There are a lot of meetings and we have a worldwide community, so not everyone who is interested can join a meeting and recordings can help people to catch-up.
However, you need to make it very clear with the speakers and to participants that:
In any case, please also make sure that meetings are minuted in a concise way (it’s not always the case that people have the time to watch the 60 minute video and they need a shorter summary). Minutes can be posted directly onto Indico (easy) or to the HSF website (via a PR).