Draft Excom Minutes

October 11, 2016

Attendees
Emily Law, President
Christine White, Vice President
Danie Kinkade, Chair, Partnership
Bill Teng, Chair, FiCom
Denise Hills, Nominations
Ken Keiser, Chair, C&B
Bob Arko, Type I Rep
Sky Bristol, Type II Rep
Ethan Davis, Chair, IT & I
Justin Goldstein, Chair, Data Stewardship
Soren Scott, Chair, P & S
Annie Burgess, Staff
Bruce Caron, Staff

Minutes

1. Approval of September Minutes Christine Moved. Denise Seconded. No objections. Minutes approved.

1. President's Report
   • Highlights
     • Moving toward a single membership non-profit organization: On October 6, a special Virtual Assembly Meeting on Federation/Foundation Merge was held. The meeting provided information on merging the Foundation for Earth Science (501(c)3) & legal entity) with the Federation for Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). Key drivers include reduction of confusion about the two separate entities and streamlining organizational structure, policies and policies that would enable the assembly, leadership team, the board and office to run ESIP more effectively. The informational package is available for all. The next step for the assembly is to pass the member resolution agreeing to the merge. Assembly vote will begin on Nov 6 and close on Dec 6. On October 7, the foundation for Earth Science board members met and passed the board resolution approving the merger proposal. The board is currently preparing the bylaws for the new organization.Emily thanked the staff and volunteers who helped put this resolution effort before the members.

1. • • Significance: We had a strong ESIP presence at the International Data Week (Sept 11-17) including ESIP exhibit space, ImHere app, members attendance of World Data System forum, multiple presentations at SciDataCon, International Data Forum, a hackathons how to workshop, and attendance of many RDA sessions. Thanks to all who attended and wore the ESIP hat. Special appreciation goes to Erin and the staff for their outstanding support and outreach effort.

1. Staff Report
   • The ESIP team supported IDW the week of 9/12. Thank you to all who contributed demos at our booth. As Emily mentioned, there was a lot of great visibility for ESIP activities. Initial follow-up was made with RDA and Belmont Forum for ways to extend ESIP's reach.
   • ESIP also received additional visibility with the launch of PREP on September 22 (White House Fact Sheet). A data working group is being led by NASA. We will keep ESIP aware of activities to contribute. If your group is interested, let Erin know.
   • Bruce led effort to prepare for the special Assembly Call and plan the merger. He is working with Board and lawyer on revised Bylaws. All members will be contacted to participate in the discussion, and then to vote. Next steps after resolution will be to reach out to current members to transfer their membership to the consolidated organization.
   • Annie Burgess is leading the next round of evaluation for AIST projects and has started evaluating the ontology repositories developed by ESIP.
   • Annie is also leading review of Student Fellow applications. We have about 15. And some are from new places, so we are excited about this turnout.
   • Erin will be at Sea Grant Week this week to make additional NOAA connections and share data management work with the Sea Grant Institutions.
   • Full ED Report from ESIP Foundation Board Meeting last week can be reviewed here
   • Over next month team will be preparing for the Winter Meeting (Look for travel info from Annie K), continuing on evaluation activities, supporting review of Incubator projects with P&S, preparing for AGU activities including Data Fair Town Halls (T-TH at lunch), booth and Ignite@AGU, announcing the new Student Fellows and supporting the Data Driven Decision Making workshop with Disaster Lifecycle cluster in DC.
   • There is a new call for incubator projects for the testbed. These will be coming in through this month.
   • Call for Sessions is open now! Deadline to get at least a placeholder for your session is the end of October.
2. Committee Reports
   • C&B
     • The 30-day comment period started on October 6 for the resolution to merge. Please add your comments to the google doc.
     • The vote will open on Nov. 6.
   • Finance--Bill
     • The board received the financial review of FY15. It was positive and no major issues were raised. Board called for an audit of FY16 because expenditures were over the legal minimum that requires an audit. Board approved preliminary FY17 budget. It was very helpful to have most committees and working groups requested budgets budgets. If your group is still outstanding, please submit as soon as possible.
   • Partnership--Danie
     • Partnership has developed a draft Member Handbook for review. Please send any comments to Danie Kinkade.
     • Partnership has received four applications. These are available online. These will be voted on at the same time ESIP votes on resolution. Also there is a new member of the committee: Kristin Wegner from UCAR.
   • Data Stewardship --Justin
     • (1) J Goldstein, HK Ramapriyan, and M Mayernik submitted a manuscript concerning the extent of Digital Object Identifier (DOI) use to Data Science Journal in the hopes of having it accepted and included in its upcoming special issue "20 years of Persistent Identifiers." This is a culmination of many committee discussions concerning the writing of papers to advance the scholarship on identifiers. (2) We used last month's edition of our standing committee meeting to "host" the ESIP-wide International Data Week review. Thanks to everyone who was on the call.
   • Education
     • Our E-book of drone activities is in draft form. We will distribute the link and gather feedback at regional National Science Teacher Association meetings this fall.
     • We have begun planning our "Out to Lunch" series of Webinars for educators. We plan to kick it off at the Winter meeting. These a 10 minute video webinars. This activity will be kicked off at the Winter meeting.
   • IT&I
     • Tech Dive Webinar Series
       • 13 October 2016: "EarthCube Integration and Test Environment (ECITE)": Phil Yang, GMU
   • Nominations --Denise

Job Description Doc

1. • • Now that the assembly call has happened, the Nominations committee is getting into full swing. We already have a few suggestions that we are working with. We plan on a call in the coming days to help define our plan of attack. If you have suggestions, or are wanting to serve, please let Denise or another member of the committee know. An ESIP-wide call for nominations will be coming soon.
       • And, it's ESIP awards nominations time too. Some awards are not specifically annual awards, but it is really important to try to recognize the people who have made significant contributions to ESIP. The ExCom has the best purview of the whole ESIP effort. The end of October is a good deadline for these awards.
   • Products & Services--Soren
     • New Incubator RFP out (thanks, A.B.); Software guidelines out for public comment (and now official, dedicated panel oral session at AGU 2016).
   • Semantic Technology--Tom
     • Ontology portal evaluation is beginning. Using the ESIP evaluation framework from previous NASA work.
     • Looking to host a semantic symposium the day before the Winter ESIP meeting. Would include other Earth science groups such as RDA, OGC, and EarthCube to develop a semantics roadmap. If anyone wants to participate, please contact Tom.
   • Visioneers--Denise
     • Telecon spoke to some meeting planning issues, and suggested some possible plenary speakers. Some discussion also about Visioneers taking on a role to look at other aspects of ESIP after the new year.

1. Type Rep Reports
   • Type One--Bob Arko: Busy time in NSF world. EarthCube Tiger Team is defining an "Architecture Implementation Plan", closely tied to roles&responsibilities of repositories. Due soon. Council of Data Facilities is planning to auto-harvest repository-level metadata. Continuing to populate +normalize ESIP Member Map. Also: Erin joined Tech&Arch Committee call on 09/21 to discuss ESIP-EarthCube collaboration. Note: Pending action items to expand the Member Map to Types II&III, and integrate with ESIP Story Maps.
   • Type Two--Skye: Will be looking to get Type 2 members into the member map.
   • Type Three

1. Other Business
   • The website will soon list the actual winter meeting sessions.
   • Some of the tabled activities are just waiting until the merger is complete. The USGCRP is scheduling a webinar in November, so a document that describes ESIP would be helpful.

Meeting adjourned at 3:46 EDT.

Tabled

1. • “How to talk about ESIP” ideas and how to grow ESIP ambassadors
   • How to document ESIP success stories - there is a technical and programmatic effort. As easy as tagging posts with #esipfed or some other hashtag, but then what do we do all the tagged content, where do we consolidate that, is that how we want to proceed with capturing success stories - let's think about this
     • NOAA has some existing framework resources on this, EarthCube is also using NOAA's work on this.