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HSF Startup Team meeting notes, Nov 17 2014

Present: Pere, Daniel, Frank, Graeme, Michel, Pete, Andrea

Apologies: Torre, Dario

Agenda

• News on contacts made, discussions had, …
• Handling letters of support
• Status of SLAC workshop
• Next steps

News on contacts made, discussions had, …

• Michel had a long chat with Matteo Cacciari, one of the leaders from the Fastjet project. The project would benefit of a communication forum and direct help on advanced technical topics. He is supportive of the idea of different membership status, even though he agrees with the pragmatic approach proposed and the single “startup member” status to start. The visibility given to the project by HSF would be also interesting, although this applies more to less established projects. Discussion: This role of support, consultancy and helping on the long-term maintenance has been mentioned in WPs. It is not obvious from where the resources will come. Pete claims that there are other ways of achieving the same by engaging collaborators to the project.

• Graeme has contacted the providers of HepForce. Not a very positive initial feedback since they see very little concrete actions proposed, which is fair since we are just defining the role the HFS should have. Some minor incorrectness has been found of the web information. They are welcome to participate to workshop at SLAC.

• Presentations and discussions at various LCG bodies.
  • The LIM (librarians and integrators meeting). The experience of the LIM people can be beneficial, since they provide complete software stacks to the experimental communities.
  • Presentation of HSF status at GDB (Grid Deployment Board) meeting.
  • A point in the MB (management board) agenda of tomorrow

• Pete has contacted Brian Behlendorf, one of the original authors of the Apache web server and principal architect of the Apache Foundation. We will try to invite him to the workshop to present about the process of forming the Apache foundation.

• Pete has also talked to Dan Katz last week, who is involved with that series of workshops and general issues of software sustainability. He is also a Program Manager at the NSF in the US, responsible for cyberinfrastructure. It would be also nice to invite him to the workshop.

Handling letters of support

• Last week Torre and Pere got an invitation to write a letter of support for an EU project proposal under the Future Emerging Technologies call H2020-FETHPC-1-2014 with deadline 25.11.2014. Discussion:

• We feel that is certainly too early in the current state of the Foundation to provide such letters. Our current advice in such cases is that proposals are free to point to HSF documents and materials that help to make their case, but without any direct comment on their proposal from HSF. They can use the material to illustrate that their proposal is well in-line with the goals and objectives of the Foundation and that it would have a broader impact.
• Daniel mentioned that at some point projects proposals with the intention to provide direct resources to the Foundation will need to receive more formal support from the Foundation itself.

Status of SLAC workshop

• No news about the status of the official web site for the workshop (registration, fees, accommodation information, etc.)

• The pre-announcement has been forwarded to many mailing lists. We hope we have reach a large portion of the community.

• We had a discussion about the agenda. We discussed the initial Pere’s proposal and Michel’s counter-proposal. The main difference being that later follows more the different topics from the synthesis white paper document. Although we agreed that the new structure follows the structure of what we would like to get out of the workshop, it is more difficult from contributors to contribute. They would need to provide several small presentations covering the different aspects at different sessions. Finally, it was agreed to organize the sessions as projects, users and funding views. In order to ensure some uniformity and facilitate the final discussion and conclusions, we need to provide them with guidelines or a questionnaire on the topics for which we would like to get their needs and opinions. We should reserve most of the second day as structured discussion. Additionally, we could also have a session on experiences in other foundations (e.g. Apache), on software sustainability, and similar experiences in other sciences.

Next steps

• Prepare the questionaries to be provided to projects and users for guiding their presentations at the workshop.
• Create an agenda skeleton with the sessions.

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