Draft Excom Minutes

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Draft Minutes for 10/8/2009

ESIP Federation Executive Committee October 8, 2009

ESIP Federation Executive Committee October 8, 2009

Participants: Karl Benedict, Jim Frew, Michael Goodman, Patricia Huff, Chuck Hutchinson, Chris Lenhardt, Carol Meyer, Margaret Mooney, Rob Raskin, Brian Rogan

Adoption of Minutes

The draft minutes from the September telecon were presented. With no discussion or amendments, Patricia Huff made a motion to approve the minutes. The motion was seconded by Michael Goodman. The minutes were approved by acclamation.

Follow up to discussion on website content - Creative Commons

Brian Rogan provided an overview of the Creative Commons licensing approach, which provides terms for how organizations make content available to others. There are six types of licenses, ranging from less restrictive to more restrictive uses of content. The ESIP Federation will need to decide which type of license is appropriate for the organization.

As a first step, the ESIP Federation needs a policy that outlines what reasonable use of its website content should be. As matter of principle, the Executive Committee concurred that all licensing should allow for content redistribution. Contributed content would allow for the contributor to choose one of the six Creative Commons licenses for that content. The policy would need a preamble that outlines the ESIP Federation’s values related to open sharing of data, information and technology. The Creative Commons license would enable the implementation of the policy. Chris Lenhardt pointed out that it will be important to embed the Creative Commons license in all content so that it flows down to both human- and machine-initiated web page hits.

Carol Meyer or Brian Rogan will draft a policy for consideration at the November Executive Committee meeting.

The Executive Committee would like to see more content migrated from the wiki to the website, especially that which is related to Meetings and Committees.

Winter Meeting Update

The registration for the winter meeting opened in late September and as usual, registrations are trickling in. The program has developed nicely, with many breakout sessions taking shape and the plenary talk invitations extended. Signals have been good – just waiting for formal commitments.

The Water, Air Quality, Decisions and Data Preservation Clusters are planning to hold mutliple breakout sessions during the meeting. There is still one open track. The Climate Literacy Network/ESIP Federation Education Committee is also interested in holding some breakout sessions.

There will be a business meeting during the January gathering. If members of the Executive Committee are interested in running for a position again that would be fine; otherwise we will need assistance to identify new candidates. An optional carbon offset purchase program is being offered with this meeting’s registration. No external partner has been selected though several have been identified. All groups under consideration have been vetted by the Environmental Defense Fund or AMS. Margaret Mooney also talked about TerraPass, a program that offers carbon offsets for air travel. She felt that it was important that we offer this option at this meeting and all future meetings.

It was agreed that this should be a part of the ESIP meeting and would make an important statement about our policy.

Committee/Working Group Budgets

As part of the on-going process to keep the ESIP Federation broader membership informed of recent activities, Committee reports are a means for communicating the on-going activities of the organization. All Committees and Working Groups will need to submit a report for the meeting. Those reports are due by December 15.

Also, Committee and Working Group budget and workplan proposals are needed by October 31 for the Finance and Appropriations Committee to review

Other Business

Metrics Brian and Carol have been working on pulling together monthly metrics. Brian will be working with other ESIP Federation leaders to pull numbers together. All suggestions are welcome for metrics.

Water Cluster The first telecon of the newly reconstituted Water Cluster took place in early October and had 20 participants. The Water Cluster is planning a sizeable presence at the January meeting as it looks at the integration of various technologies and their underlying semantic capabilities.

A motion to adjourn was passed and the meeting finished at 2:56 PM.