Approved Excom Minutes/Excom 2016/March 2016

Attendees

• Emily Law, President
• Christine White, Vice President
• Denise Hills, Chair, Nomination Committee
• Ken Keiser, Chair, C&B
• Ethan Davis, Chair, IT&I
• Soren Scott, Chair, Products and Services
• Justin Goldstein, Chair, Data Stewardship
• Bill Teng, Chair, Chair, FiCom
• LuAnn Dahlman, Chair, Education
• Danie Kinkade, Chair, Partnership
• Tom Narock, Chair, Semantic Technologies
• Sky Bristol, Type II
• Kathy Fontaine, RDA, GEO
• Leslie Hsu, USGS
• Erin Robinson, Staff
• Annie Burgess, Staff
• Rebecca Fowler, Staff

Minutes

1. February Minutes are pending approval.
2. GEO Update
   • Kathy Fontaine is the ESIP representative to the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) board. GEO is an intergovernmental organization focused on coordinated, comprehensive and sustained Earth observations and information. Kathy spoke about the current GEO work plan, noting it is transitional and is only in effect until their 3-5 year plan comes together. Kathy’s roll on the GEO board will be advocating for how ESIP can contribute to GEO. Kathy said that there is a great emphasis on user engagement and involvement at GEO, however there is a lack of definition regarding who users are. While GEO is not a scientific organization or research body, it is a way that research results can be feed into an applications arena. GEO engages with member nations who attend the plenary and bring their nation’s data policies - there is a lot of international pressure to share Earth science data in an open fashion. A USGEO and ESIP connection would be a great linkage between GEO and USGEO.
   • Action
     • Blog post about ESIP and GEO, including success stories around data citation guidelines.
3. SciDataCon Session Coordination - Build on Big Data and Earth Sciences theme
4. President's Report
   • Highlight
     • Significance: The Education Committee is focusing on using recreational drones for STEM learning. Two webinars on drones for educators are planned on March 22 and April 26. The goal of the first one is to inspire participants by sharing some of the great things drones are being used for. The second is on gathering and organizing data by drones.
     • Significance: The All Hazards Consortium and StormCenter Communications, Inc. have launched the GeoCollaborate™ Disaster Lifecycle Testbed activity within the Multi-State Fleet Response Working Group (FRWG). The FRWG will be testing data access and sharing of critical data layers in a collaborative environment to improve situational awareness and decision making. The testbed activity was introduced to the East Coast Corridor Coalition (EC3) Executive Steering Committee and was well received.
     • GEO partnership: The nomination of Kathy Fontaine to be a member on the GEO Programme Board representing ESIP has been accepted. Congratulations, Kathy! She will be participating in the Program Board Work Plan Symposium to be held in Geneva in May, GEO-XIII Plenary to be held in St. Petersburg in November, as well as other periodic telecom meetings.
   • Actions
     • Contact Christine and me if you have any significant events, acknowledgement/recognition you would like to be highlighted in the President’s report.
     • Reminder: ExCom to review and add ideas to 2016 work list on the ExCom Work plan. We’d like your inputs/feedback as well as help to prioritize this year’s work. This will assist in identifying opportunities to get involved.
5. Staff Report
   • Highlights
     • GoToMeeting Migration - ESIP is transitioning from WebEx to GoToMeeting to host all of our community telecons. ESIP staff will make every effort to make this a seamless transition, including notifying collaboration area chair person(s) of when their area is switching over, updating the collaboration area wikis with new GoTo telecon links, providing instruction on how to start and run a meeting and offering a training practice call. We will also make ourselves available to anyone responsible for starting and running the telecons if they would like to practice ahead of time.
     • NSF Spoke proposal in collaboration with Univ. of Wyoming, Univ of Washington and NCAR submitted Feb. 25.
     • NOAA proposal is in last rounds of development and will be submitted next week. Thanks to those who have contributed updates.
     • Supported ESIP Collaboration areas in planning for 2016
     • OGC Updates - Annie Burgess attended the OGC Testbed-12 kick-off, specifically looking for ways to connect the ESIP Testbed activities or improve the Testbed. Erin is at OGC this week to support the Open Climate Data Repository activity started by Steve Adler at the Winter Meeting.
   • Actions:
     • If you have other ideas of NOAA-specific accomplishments or activities for the next three years, email Erin.
     • Plenary speaker suggestions for the ESIP Summer meeting should be added here
     • Rebecca led development of a Meeting Sponsorship prospectus. Please share this with partners who may be interested in sponsoring.
6. Committee Reports
   • C&B - met on Feb 19
     • Updating bylaws document per Winter Meeting Assembly approval
     • Preparing for participation with Federation-Foundation re-integration efforts - more to come
     • Discussed "Standing Rules" (now "Policies and Procedures") document to help groups define details beyond bylaws - template/example available for review
     • Revisiting officer terms + with respect to Fed-Found integration efforts - more to come
   • Finance
     • Status of FY16 proposed budgets: (1) approved supplemental travel budget from Data Stewardship Comm (for Force-11) and (2) responded to Semantic Technologies Comm - requested some changes and more information; specifically, an initial $ amount was approved for "AWS Computer Resources" to facilitate the analysis of requirements, options, and costs; goal of "AWS Computer Resources" is to enable a dedicated, long-term resource available ESIP-wide.
     • Ficom discussing with C&B on "standing rules" document.
   • Partnership
     • New Committee met for the first time Feb 29, to meet-n-greet, and discuss with Erin goals and objective of the committee, perhaps expanding the traditional Partnership role. This first meeting was primarily to explore this idea of expanding the scope and identify some near term activities to check off the list (e.g., polishing the New Member Packet, reviewing ESIP 1-pager and previous Partnership Strategic Plans). Next steps are to draft the SP, complete the New Member Packet, review of new member applications, and brainstorm for summer meeting engagement.
   • Data Stewardship
     • We are looking forward to hearing about last week's RDA plenary during our March meeting. We also continued framing our paper pertaining to the use of identifiers for non-datasets.
   • Education
     • We expect to begin advertising our two Webinars and the Educator workshop this week. You can view developing outlines for each session in this slide deck.
   • IT&I
   • Nominations
   • Products & Services
     • We are beginning an activity to develop ESIP software evaluation guidelines, potentially through a P&S working group. We are also exploring using rotating co-chairs for the committee (reminder: looking for interested volunteers from other clusters). Discussing the larger tech evaluation needs (reuse, readiness levels, metrics) with other committees/clusters and potential sessions for Chapel Hill.
   • Semantic Technology
     • We received budget feedback from FiComm and are proceeding with exploration of compute resources. This is being done in conjunction with Products and Services and the Cloud Computing Cluster to reuse existing information and best practices. We have initiated a discussion on ontology governance and software reuse in conjunction with other ESIP groups. Discussion will continue and we plan to have a session on these topics at the summer meeting. We are beginning a comparison of ontology portals and features. Look for a survey to be conducted ESIP-wide to better understand what the community needs in an ontology repository.
7. Type Rep Reports
   • Type I - No Type report.
   • Type II - No Type report.
   • Type III - No Type report.
8. Other Business
   • Leslie Hsu, USGS, reported on the joint USGS & ESIP Software and Data Carpentry Workshop to be held April 12-14th at the Denver Federal Center, Denver, CO.