20142410 Telecon

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

Agenda

1. Goings on in the world of Sci. Software:

- NIH Software Discovery Index: http://softwarediscoveryindex.org/

- Mozlilla Collaboration portal: http://collaborate.mozillascience.org/

- A cool new extension of docker to R, creatively called Rocker: http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2014/10/23/#introducing_rocker

2. Winter meeting ideas? We scheduled a session, so we should brainstorm what we think a good use of that time might be...

3. A few of us are putting together a test-bed proposal for the software cluster:

The working title is borrowed from ongoing work of a number of other people ---> "Minimal metadata schemas for science software and code, in JSON and XML."


Notes from meeting


We spent first half of the meeting brainstorming on a testbed proposal that can be found here:

https://github.com/nniiicc/ESIP_TestBed_CodeMinMeta


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IDEAS for winter meeting

Our general idea is to build upon the recommendations from the summer meeting

Examples of potential ways to incentivize software contribution (i.e. badges) , Award for best software effort, etc.


The session might work as follows:

- Begin with overview of recommendations ( Bob Downs volunteered to do this) - Assign people to lead small discussion on most promising areas (3-4) - Criteria for selection should be easy / low hanging fruit

To do: Nic revise the session on the commons and email group the recommendations from WSSSPE paper.

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Categories from WSSSPE paper:

- Collaboration - Publications and Presentations - Workshops, training and best practices - Develop and document best practices - Incentives and motivations - Reviewed software repository

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A Policy statement on Software for Earth Science Research:

Inspired by http://www.change.org/p/everyone-in-the-research-community-we-must-accept-that-software-is-fundamental-to-research-or-we-will-lose-our-ability-to-make-groundbreaking-discoveries

ESIP has done policy statement related to data access and citations - so should ESIP take this on - should this group be responsible for writing that statement - or driving the writing of this statement?

Software cluster agreed that a potential next step for ESIP is to draft and distribute to partners a statement about importance of sustaining research software.

Nic recommends working with http://www.isi.edu/ikcap/geosoft/ group if we decide to do this.

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For next meeting:

- Review WSSSPE - Further discuss the policy statement, and assign tasks for winter meeting.