P&S Monthly Aug 21, 2009

Present: Rob Raskin (JPL), Tyler Stevens (GCMD), Bruce Barkstrom, Daniel Ziskin (NGDC), Phil Yang (GMU), Yuechen Chi, Bob Downs and John Scialdo (CIESIN), Carol Meyer (ESIP), Wenwen Li (GMU)

The $20K allocated to the Committee is now available to be spent on the Testbed. Two programmers will use these funds for contract work - one will be based at GMU and the other will be Yuechen Chi. Yuechen will provide Drupal support for all Testbed activities.

The ESIP web site has been migrated to run under Drupal. Accounts are now being set up to enable member access. A database of the approximately 800 people affiliated with the Federation has been set up (as an Access database file) and is available for use with the expert skills database.

At the Federation meeting, Daniel presented an idea for a formal Service Exchange, in which members earn points for providing services and spend points for using services. He identified a Drupal module (Complementary Currencies, for Drupal 6) that implements this capability.

Bruce B. described the objectives of the Preservation and Stewardship Cluster activities on the Testbed. The Testbed will enable datasets to be registered according to various unique object identifiers, as specified by that Cluster. Registration information will reside in a database (under Drupal), but datasets themselves will not be stored on the Federation web site, unless a special need exists. The Fall AGU will include a Town Hall on publication of datasets (including concepts of unique data identifiers).