Draft Excom Minutes

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

Attendees

  • Denise Hills, Chair, Nomination Committee
  • Ken Keiser, Chair, C&B
  • Ethan Davis, Chair, IT&I
  • Christine White, Chair, Products and Services
  • Erin Robinson, Staff
  • Annie Burgess, Staff
  • Rebecca Fowler, Staff
  • Emily Law, Vice President
  • Justin Goldstein, Chair, Data Stewardship
  • Bill Teng, Chair, FiCom
  • Tyler Stevens, Partnership
  • Ted Habermann, Type III Rep
  • Steven Richard, Type II Rep
  • Danie Kinkade, Type I Rep
  • Peter Fox, President

Executive Committee Business

  1. Approval of October Minutes
    • Christine White motioned to approve Minutes and Justin Goldstein seconded. The minutes were approved by acclamation.
  2. President's Report
    • Peter Fox, Erin Robinson and Rebecca Fowler are in attendance at GEO.
    • There is a strong expression of interest from NOAA in the ESIP testbed relative to the assessment of technology readiness. NOAA is impressed with ESIP’s approach.
    • We have new student fellows for 2016 and we are actively looking for ways to acknowledge our current students fellows. Get in touch with Annie Burgess about ideas for acknowledgement or if you have questions about the process of selecting fellows.
  3. ESIP/FES Relationship - FES, in consultation with their lawyer, concluded the conditions leading to the leadership split of the ESIP Federation and Foundation was a mistake. The FES lawyer assumed that ESIP leadership was paid. Because no one is paid for ESIP leadership, there is no conflict of interest between FES and ESIP. This realization changes the options for the relationship between FES and ESIP. Peter Fox will be reviewing this opinion with ESIP legal council and will report back to ExCom on the results. The group discussed this new information and potential consequences and alternative leadership structures. A question was raised about the cost of legal review and where those funds come from. Peter will work to keep ExCom and when appropriate the broader ESIP community apprised with a wiki page.
  4. ESIP Budget Introduction - The FY16 budget line items were discussed with particular disucssion on how ESIP Meeting registration revenue is divided.
    • Action: Erin will clean up the spreadsheet so it can go out for membership comment.
  5. Staff Reports
    Erin Robinson reported that she and Rebecca are at GEO this week. ESIP has booth and is looking forward to establishing a productive relationship with GEO. Erin updated the group on All-Hub Regional Big Data Hub meeting in D.C. the first week of November. There is a new NSF solicitation for Big Data Spokes that may be of interest to ESIP community. It will focus on regionally-specific, thematic areas.
    Annie Burgess - Reported that the Technology Evaluation is on track and reports are due Nov. 17. As part of the Tech Evaluation work, she spent the day at JPL meeting with the AIST PIs. The Evaluation work will be presented at AGU and there will be a session at the ESIP Winter Meeting. She participated in the IEEE Big Data in Geosciences workshop and represented ESIP on a panel. Finally, Annie reported on the 2016 Student Fellow status. Details will be shared with community at large in the next week.
    Rebecca Fowler - Reported
    • Working on press release for new student fellows.
    • We’ll do an AGU media advisory for the first time that will highlight ESIP participation in AGU (Ignite, awards, booth).
    • 12 Ignite speakers and more submissions that ever.
    • Ignite event at the Oceans meeting went really well.
    • Working on communication activities around the ESIP winter meeting.
  6. Meeting Updates
    • Annie Burgess is working on the at-a-glance.
    • We will need to consolidate sessions.
    • NOAA is having its environmental data management meeting preceding the ESIP Winter Meeting and ESIP members are invited to its closing plenary.
    • Summer Meeting locations:
      • University of New Hampshire: There is a train from the airport. 77 rooms near the University.
      • Friday Center, Chapel Hill: We have worked with Chamber of Commerce to shuttle folks from Franklin Street to the Friday center.
      • There are no budgetary differences between the two locations.
    • Group likes the idea of optimizing socializing/networking in and around meeting.
  7. Committee Reports
    • FiCom: We have a draft announcement for request for budget. We need to clarify with Erin policy for labor. Within the committee itself we need to work on budget for travel for invited speakers.
    • Partnership: Received a new member application for AGU. Will quickly review that this week and get out soon for 30-day review period. Also working on new text for ESIP member join page and membership experience gap analysis.
    • Data Stewardship: David Moroni from JPL gave a presentation on the data infrastructure at PO.DAAC on last telecon. Nancy Hobelheinrich and Jay Carlson have submitted a statement of interest in response to the USGS Community for Data Integration RFP. Discussion of holding a recap on the RDA plenary. Sara Ramdeen attended a talk on the French Minister on Technology talking about the differences between French and US law related to data. Mendeley is allowing identifiers. More details on DS wiki.
    • IT&I: No November IT&I Rant and Rave.
    • Nominations: We have a comprehensive ballot in place subject to any changes that may come. Thanks to all for stepping up. Denise will write up a how-to for whomever does this next.
    • Products and Services: We have another testbed call out with Deadline December 1. TCB will review and notify. P&S has gotten ideas together for Winter Meeting. Funding Friday folks have been submitting sessions to the Winter Meeting.
  8. Type Reports
    • Type I: Getting data repository people together using a common poster template together. Showing connectedness of repos within ESIP.
    • Type 2: Nothing to report.
    • Type 3: Nothing to report.
  9. Other Business
    • Ken Keiser walked through: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TEhDx3yNH9paeFB_gwV5L3xdUGuzXb_my9rNinJQD1g/edit
      • Lots of positive feedback on this document, with the most conversation revolving around improving the continuity of the officers.
      • Trying to make some decisions on where this type of information needs to go, i.e. not going into C&B.
      • Recommendation would be that if it was decided to go with a 3-year term approach, there needs to be some high-level information on what the roles of the president/past-president roles would be.
    • Peter Fox suggested going back into the document and synthesizing comments. Federation bylaws would be translated into the Foundation bylaws. We might have to get this discussion completed quickly because of the potential merge.