HEP Software Foundation Startup Team Meeting notes May 4 2015

Agenda

Present: Torre, Dario, Pere, Benedikt, Richard, Liz, Daniel, Andrea Apologies: Graeme

Page created with the initial guidelines for project to be part of HSF were started by Pere and Benedikt. Feedback from Torre and Brett incorporated. This is now linked from the Projects page and the Startup team page.
In the knowledge base for projects, several views should be provided to indicate clearly in which state is the project. A field with the state of the project within the HSF can be used to generate the views.
It would be nice to provide a template, in markdown format, for providing and formatting the relevant information according to the guidelines.

Dario reported the progress. They will start with a proposal on how to get results on little time. The idea is to collect the information and provide the information in a format useful for our community. Filling the gap between University to the HEP needs is the first priority. Small document with the findings. He plans to resume on this activity this week and have a document by the end of the week.
The idea is to start regular meetings for this training WG.
The training platform where to upload the materials is still missing. However, pointers to already existing material in the Web can be made available very quickly.
Pere thinks that building a complete curricula is essential. This can be addressed by the WG meetings.
Torre reminded about the Yelp! model suggested at the HSF meeting. Basically should apply to any given entry in the knowledge base. Already now each entry admits to have some comments. Probably stars are needed when the number of comments will be large and you need some statistics. A simple comment is a good way to start.

Liz and Benedikt will setup a time this week for a meeting. They need to digest what is already available in the GitHub discussion. Basically to moderate and provide a summary paper with concrete output and a glossary. Next Monday they will be reporting more news.

##Development Tools

Started to update some entries in the knowledge base. The already available information needs to be homogenized a bit.
Pere thinks that we need to identify somebody that can lead and take the responsibility that the information is complete, and ensure that developers update their own package entries. Torre thinks that should be more collective, this is not incompatible with somebody chasing developers to update and enter information.
Andrea has volunteer to help on this. He cannot start working immediately, but he will be able in 2-3 weeks.

Torre will be contacting Julius Hrivnac to ask him to look at the twitter drupal plugin to enable HSF to post to a twitter feed.
Pere suggested to start a weekly HSF bulletin/newsletter/blog with concise and relevant information about the HSF such as meetings, new packages, training opportunities, new releases of major packages, etc. Proposal well received. It should be consider as the heartbeat of the Foundation. It should have a RSS compatible feed. We will comeback to next meeting with this proposal.

Dario illustrated a typical request from a group in INFN requiring some help on license issues. Recommending a given license (such as BSD) is a good start but the problem is a bit more complicated when it involves a private company also using the software and imposing some constrains. The CERN recommendations covers a number of use-cases that can help on this. Providing legal expertise is probably out of the scope for the time being.
Pere will ask John Harvey to lead the License task force and invite people like Tim Smith to participate. Other labs requirements, such as Fermilab’s, can be very simple and say that BSD is recommended. Richard experience with Geant4 can be very useful. Transferring IP can only be made to a legal entity and this may be complex in general. He says that BSD is also adequate for DoE.
About the creation of legal entity for HSF. Is this worth for the Foundation? We need to be ready to defend the benefits against the cost and the difficulties. There could be problems with existing institutions for transferring ownership of their software to this legal entity. It is a difficult question. It would be nice to go further and identify the possible problems.