20141405 Telecon

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

Software Cluster Telecon 05.14.2014

Agenda

Most of today's telecon will be spent reviewing proposed sessions for the summer meeting, "Linking It Together: Sustainable Software Advancing Science Data and Services" The working [agenda] has already been posted, and includes at least three science software related sessions:

- Software metrics led by James Howison

- Building a community around a software package led by Ethan White

- Software Citation led by Matt Mayernik and Nic Weber


Sci Software Updates

- The NIH held a 2 day workshop this week on "Discovering, Citing, Tracking Biomedical Software" - although the focus was on biomed, lots of the discussions were relevant to ESIP community. [Day 1 Video] & [Day 2 Video].1/4 of the way through Day 2 video is 20 minute presentation by Phil Bourne, newly appointed head of "Big Data" at NIH, that is worth watching.

- Notable papers posted to ArXiv [Change Management and Version Control of Scientific Applications] is a small survey about version control.

- Dan Katz announced a second WSSSPE at SC 14 in New Orleans [CFP] and revised the review of the first [workshop].

Telecon Notes

14.05.2014

Started off talking about whats happening in the world of Software (see agenda).

Erin brief on summer meeting:

- Yolanda Gil and Dan Katz to keynote

- Want to have takeaways and evaluative criteria for whether or not a targeted theme (i.e. software) makes an impact on ESIP community

- Working with J. Howison to think about how to measure this

- Ref. to Gil's recent pub on caring for your data

- Idea is to generate lists - i.e 10 simple things to improve software stewardship.

Roundtable discussion:

- Proposed by Lenhardt et al.

- How should it work?

- Bob Downs: needs to be very finely scoped

- Lunch tables dedicated to specific themes? (Tool developers, FLOSS, etc ) or topics (version control, education, etc)

- Will there be any sort of wrap-up or take away?

- Potential for using "floating" slots on the schedule for doing just that...perhaps a Friday lunch topic (if people stick around)

Updates from those that have proposed session:

Ethan: Idea is to generate best practices, helpful use cases around specific software community - tricks of the trade for sustaining and improving community.

Bruce C: Working with J. Howison, will discuss the importance of quant. / metrics for software contributions.

Matt M. Strong tie in to Bruce and James topic... idea is to 1st map between ESIP principles for data citation and software citation - What is missing? What needs to be expanded and changed? Then consider broader picture of aggregating citations, authorship, attribution, etc. Another initial step might be to type software and decide how and when to cite different types (algorithm, script, full software package, library, etc.)


All session leaders agreed to think about ways to survey in their session.

Next steps:

- Iron out roundtable for Tues (?) lunch, and logistics.

- Come up with working, pragmatic definitions of sustainability and software so as not to let discussions devolve into "What do we mean when we say X"

- Reach out to Software Sustainability Institute in the UK to see if they will be participating (or want to)

- Survey the survey literature in Mendeley group.