Telecon 03.15.13 materials

Carol Meyer, Chris Lehnert and I had an opportunity to chat with Paul Uhlir (from BRDI) via telecon with the goal of better understanding the decadal survey process and how ESIP could best help the BRDI in bringing along the idea of a data decadal survey.

Paul supported the idea from our telecon of drafting a mission statement for the cluster. He particularly supported Rama's suggestion, which is this: "Assess need for a data decadal survey and develop a set of possible statements of task defining its scope", though would replace "tasks" with "options". A page for that discussion is available here: Cluster mission statement.

We agreed that while the compilation of a reference list is useful and should continue, conducting an actual literature review at this point in time doesn't seem like the best use of our resources. I think this makes sense. Please continue to contribute to that reference list if you encounter relevant material. The list is here: Reference list

We discussed possible targets for the summer and fall. Our next opportunity will be the ESIP summer meeting in July. As Chris suggested in our telecon, we liked the idea of a panel discussion at the summer meeting with agency representatives to get their perspectives on the scope of a survey, pros and cons of different approaches, and a start towards scoping where the ESIP community would like to be 10 years out.

We discussed the idea of targeting a subsequent meeting that would bring together representatives from agencies beyond ESIP, eg RDA, CODATA, MIT libraries/Anne Wolpert, … to get similar input.

The BRDI will be meeting in September.

A decadal survey typically costs $1M or more. Being cross domain, this particular survey could be organized by forming subpanels around clusters of issues within domains. Results could then be integrated into a final report. Outreach to various community members would be a big aspect.

Other points:

• Issues are largely the same across disciplines
• Who are the constituencies?
• Is the data life cycle model sufficient? software introduces even greater issues
• a survey goal (as opposed to a cluster goal): research strategy for data management