Meeting notes for the Feb 23 2015 HSF startup team meeting

Attending: Torre, Pere, Benedikt, Amber, Andrea, Liz, Daniel

Apologies: Dario

Updates

Torre - summary still in progress

Pere - recuperating!

Andrea - on Wed having the packaging discussion led by Benedikt (who joined the meeting).

Liz - trying to get Fermilab people to join that meeting.

Benedikt - apologies for timing, rather LHC-centric. Will report next time what emerges from it. A brainstorming session. Have had a few responses to the request for one-pagers. [Torre after the meeting encouraged some in ATLAS to participate.]

Update from Dario by email: started a roundup of discussions within INFN to see how many volunteers (if any) exist in our local community for the tutoring model I have in mind, and so far the results are, let’s say, encouraging.

Pere - got a mail from Markus Elsing proposing a forum for discussion of reco algorithms. Emerged from “Connecting the Dots” workshop on tracking at Fermilab. Interest in starting the equivalent of the Concurrency Forum addressing reco algorithms, as suggested in the SLAC workshop. To share knowledge, new ideas and developments, awareness of what people are doing. Long term ambition could be a palette of tools, less agreement on that but agreement on the short term. On the practical side, requires identifying the convener, and go from there, with forum etc.

*** Proposal in the meeting: establish a working group on this and ask Markus if he will convene it.

It was noted that an item from last week was to contact the guinea pig projects. Haven’t done it yet. Also in the workshop we discussed an ‘associate member’ level for mature projects well past the ‘incubator’ stage and so not following the HSF life cycle but interested in an association with HSF.

*** Should have the initial list of guinea pig projects in hand for the next IFB.

Mentioned in the meeting were

And as associate members: ROOT Geant4

*** Templates for incubators is a priority. Benedikt has started to put together the beginnings of templates for incubator projects. We decided to nominate him to convene a short term working group (as discussed in the workshop) to define what we mean by project membership/participation/life cycle levels and for the principal focus of incubator projects, put together a first version of templates.

A first activity of the WG would be to have a meeting of interested existing projects, to have projects figure out among themselves what associate membership etc means, what should be in the templates, and so on.

*** Another priority activity is licensing. We decided to convene a working group on licensing and ask John to chair it. Clearly one of the principal inputs and resources to the WG is CERN’s document (linked from our doc page). Agreed approach to our licensing recommendations is to be minimally restrictive. Question of ownership of software was raised. Having a license means having some responsible body behind it. It can’t be HSF without HSF being a legal organization which is not going to happen anytime soon. Use CERN?

There was some discussion on terminology: working groups, task forces, …

Website: as we accrue activities and projects we need to think about website main page organization, can’t just keep adding tabs.

Suggested main page organization:

Tabs:

Also: Expand “what’s new” into a main component of the page, like Latest News, Latest Activity on Apache SF page. Move most of the HSF description boilerplate to the Foundation page.

IFB meeting next week:

Should cover

AOB

Meeting next Monday, and IFB meeting next Wed.