Draft Excom Minutes

Attendees

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

Approval of August Minutes

1. Approval of October Minutes

   • Denise motioned to approve Minutes as amended and Christine seconded. The minutes were approved by acclamation.

President's Report

1. RDA

   • In September 2016, 8th RDA plenary in conjunction with a Week of Data, which ESIP should become involved.
   • RDA testbed discussions. ESIP could inform/share our experience with testbeds.

Comment on President’s Report:

• (Ken) There are the beginnings of an EarthCube testbed that could be included in the discussion of an RDA testbed.
• (Christine) How can we share testbed best practices.

Staff Report

1. Erin Robinson

   • Call for IGNITE@AGU has been released.
   • We have been offered a shared booth space with DataONE and SEEDnet.
   • ESIP, in collaboration with USGS’s Community for Data Integration (CDI) submitted a ‘statement of interest’ to the CDI funding cycle on a training clearinghouse for data management training materials.
   • Foundation board meeting tomorrow.

2. Annie

   • AIST Technology evaluations have started.
   • 8 total evaluators for 3 projects.
   • The Technology Evaluation Framework is an informational portal, but there is still lots of email communication that needs to happen to keep things moving.
   • Several editorial pieces coming out: Member Highlights and Interviews.

Budget Report

1. Peter

   • Erin has produced a detailed budget for the foundation that has income and expenses.
   • This is an introduction to the budget. An email will be sent out after this meeting regarding what input is being sought from ExCom related to the budget.
   • The idea is to have a process around having a balanced budget on a ~yearly basis. This is important because money in the Federation flows to student fellows, ExCom travel, committees, so the budget document is meant to be more explicit in describing what the expense categories are. Including identifying programmatic elements.
   • We are positioning ourselves for a more detailed budget discussion in November.

2. Erin

   • When looking at the income, there are known commodities such as Raskin money, NASA, NOAA. Then there is registration fees, which is dependent on meeting attendance. Also potential for sponsorship income.

Comments on the budget:

• (Justin) Is the fact that we are already into FY16 reflected in the budget?

1. • (Erin) No, we aren’t prorating.
   • (Erin) The budget is balanced with registration, which is why the budget is balanced to < $1.

• (Danie) What would sponsorship look like for one of the meetings?

1. • (Erin) Sponsorship and registration can cover the meeting costs, then our sponsorship $ can be used to expand our programmatic capabilities, i.e. student fellows. Time for us to think about how we spend out money and where. Sponsorship opportunities could be sponsoring beer/wine at posters, funding Friday prize, student fellow travel.

Committee Notes

1. Partnership: The ESIP partnership committee is starting on two additional tasks that came out of our strategic plan: (1) Update the ESIP members join page; and (2) Identify gaps in membership and target opportunities (recommendation).
2. Education: We're exploring the idea of building a finite series of professional development experiences around a single theme (drones, for instance). Our goal is to build awareness, skills, and knowledge about data science among educators through interaction with data scientists and hands-on experiences. We also plan to explore the possibilities of securing some funding for this through private foundations.

Action Items

1. Justin G is excited about the idea of a Semantic committee. It would help to see a bit more of the specificity of how the semantics could integrate with other ESIP clusters.

   • Tom N. will follow up on Justin's comment.

2. Look at the strategic plan in light of the semantic web becoming a semantic web cluster. Will the actions have to be updated as a committee.

   • Tom N. will follow up.

3. Add something to next agenda about other technologies to promote.
4. Confirm Ken's language on Semantic Committee motion.
5. Annie B. to send out TOP guidelines.