Winter 2011 Meeting

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

Planning for the Winter 2011 Meeting

Jan 4-6, 2011, Washington, DC

Venue

Dupont Renaissance Hotel Meeting Capacity

5 Breakout rooms

Theme Ideas

  • Making Data Matter: Maximizing/Measuring/Evaluating/Harnessing the Value/Power/Impact of Data and Information
  • Making Data Matter: Adding Value through Collaboration
  • Defining Success for Earth Science Impacts: How to Provide Results for a Sustainable World

Possible Speakers

  • Ann Doucette, The Evaluators Institute
  • OMB (Shelley Metzenbaum)
  • Bob Donahue, WGBH & NSDL Community Member on webmetrics [1]
  • Perspectives Panel from the Agencies
  • Rep. from The Hill?
  • Mary Kicza
  • Bibliometrics person
  • Foundation (MacArthur, Pew, [jesse Asubel from Sloan?]
  • Google analytics person
  • Heidi Cullen, Climate Central

Potential Breakouts

  • Challenges in managing Earth Science Data and Information (data volume, data quality, data access/search, data dissemination, data analysis in distributed environment and multiple data sources,...)
  • Existing technologies and needed technologies that address these challenges (cloud storage, cloud computing, distributed architecture, information architecture, immersive visualization, mobil apps..)
  • Climate Change Education panel breakout. Public or perish.
  • How the Federation can help promote member products and services.

Topics

  • Emerging Evaluation Technologies
  • Converting Google Analytics Into Reportable Information
  • NSF evaluation needs/techniques
  • Associated Topics - Communicating Your Success (Telling the Story of Success), Valuing (in economic terms) Your Success, Measuring Progress (as opposed to only measuring outcomes, outputs), Evaluation for Decision Making. How to actually get broader impacts for your research, and how to measure these when you get them.

Issues for Consideration

  • Juried Posters
  • Criteria for Judging?
  • Innovation of Project
  • Collaboration/Community
  • How it fits within ESIP Federation
  • Relate back to theme of meeting
  • Reward
  • newsletter/ESIP Website
  • presentation at ESIP session/travel support (e.g. $500 stipend) toward a professional meeting (AGU)
  • Meeting Proceedings
  • micro articles

Visioneer recommendations

2 prizes: the community choice prize is voted by people in the room (each person gets a vote marker), and is guided by the notion of "most Federation collaboration" visible. The theme award is for the poster that best fits the meeting theme (again by popular vote). Type reps break ties. Suggested prizes: newsletter recognition, Amazon gift card, etc. to be determined by staff...


Survey Responses

197 attended the meeting and 34 were online. 55 filled out surveys of those 17 were new members and 7 participated online. The survey results: The first page of the spreadsheet is overall results. The next pages are comments about changes, locations, topics to be repeated or covered and the online feedback. In general the feedback about the Winter Meeting was positive.

Overall people liked the location, hotel and food. The only negatives about the hotel were technology related. For people at the meeting, there were struggles with the internet connection and poor cell phone reception in meeting areas. From the virtual participants, the comments were generally positive about seeing the plenary part, with the exception of not being able to hear questions. The virtual participants wanted to be able to connect during the breakout sessions and here we fell short. Many numbers/links we posted before the meeting did not working because we couldn't run simultaneous meetings with our provider, so many online were disappointed about missing out.

People were generally happy with the plenary sessions, lots of interest in following up the story-telling workshop this summer. People also were positive about technical breakouts. Semantic Web was the most mentioned. There also were comments that people would like to see more detailed agendas, so that they could pop in and out of multiple breakout sessions according to their interest. One point to highlight is that only half the survey respondents went to workgroup or cluster breakout sessions.

One general comment was that people talk to who they know. Since one of the main reasons people come to Federation meetings is for networking and idea exchange it may be good if we could find ways to mix people up: Try a speed dating of some sort, so that there is more mixing among attendees. Seems that sub groups tend to talk a lot only among themselves.

Survey Results