Advancing high energy physics community software
Present/Contributing: Eduardo Rodrigues, Stefan Roiser, Johannes Elmsheuser, Claire Antel, Graeme A Stewart, Torre Wenaus, Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Michel Villanueva, Michel Jouvin, Mark Neubauer
Apologies: Caterina Doglioni
Submission to EPJ C is done. (This will be published as an editorial article, with no changes to the content.)
There were some comments about the use of acronyms, which we should define more clearly (or add a glossary), plus a few other technical points. We think these are easy to address - Michel will take a first pass.
Content was generally praised!
IJClab took over the hepsoftwarefoundation.org
domain.
This is effectively “infinite” as the lab manages many domain names like this.
ACTION: Michel to have a contact at the lab and pass this on.
There is an action on Paul and Graeme to follow up w.r.t. advertising the HSF within the collaborations/communities.
We need to draft a text that we can suggest things (still TODO). We thought it would be good to target the new intake of students in the Autumn.
Ongoing investigations of a more formal MoU and independent status. Unfortunately, no progress since the last meeting.
Still general interest in becoming some sort of association?
Caterina: the same “introspective” discussion is ongoing in EuCAIF (where the HSF is brought as an example of a very useful organisation!). Personally, I’d start with trying to understand why we want to become a more formal collaboration and what we’d get if we changed from the current do-ocracy / volunteer model. Maybe we start a brainstorming document?
Change of CERN directorate mean that it would be difficult to make progress until next year.
An update has been informally proposed for now:
A simple “HSF Affiliated Project” badge, that says the project fulfils the Best Practice guidelines here: https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/projects/guidelines.html and in particular the 9 general guidelines (not the 2 optional ones !).
There seemed to be support for the idea of having more nuanced badges, for having extra user support etc. - maybe we should just start with “implements best practice”, which should be relatively quick.
We also propose to work with the experiments to compile a list of the software packages that are used.
We decided we should make the criteria more flexible and Graeme had a stab at it: https://github.com/HSF/hsf.github.io/pull/1746
ACTION: review and post online asap the new guidelines.
If you know of someone who is active in community work and shares the HSF’s goals consider inviting them to be on the SG.
Additional post-mortem points?
Should we have a particular focus on Software Sustainability? It is a popular and very relevant topic, with lots of cross-experiment potential. Would it be useful if the HSF were to solicit a mandate from WLCG for this task? It would need to then be expressed as a concrete time-bound task.
Updates from CD on green/sustainable software:
Action:
As ever… Chairing sign up document.
Not before September. Enjoy the Summer break :)!