Draft Excom Minutes

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Ex-Com Minutes, September 2016

Attending:

  • Emily Law, President,
  • Christine White, VP,
  • Denise Hills, Nominations,
  • Ethan Davis, Chair, IT & I,
  • Ken Keiser, Chair, C&B,
  • Soren Scott, Chair, P & S,
  • Bill Teng, Chair, Finance,
  • Beth Huffer, Semantics
  • Justin Goldstein, Chair, Data Stewardship,
  • Ted Habermann, Type III Rep,

Ex-officio:

  • Erin Robertson,
  • Bruce Caron

1. Approval of August Minutes

  • Ken moved, Denise seconded. No Objections.

2. President's Report

  • Highlights
  • USGCRP: Thanks to Justin’s, we (Erin, Justin, Richard Eckman and I) met with USGCRP leadership team to discuss area of mutual interests and collaboration opportunities on August 24. Agenda and participations are posted here. The meeting was informative and productive. Several approaches were identified for the two organizations to move forward in common efforts that are mutually beneficial. Next steps in the near term include planning of the next meeting at AGU, a webinar to introduce ESIP to broader USGCRP groups. Summary of the telecom can be found here.
  • Next steps: An introduction of ESIP with the wider USGCRP team.

3. Staff Report

  • We are busy with IDW.
  • Annie: Sent out an initial email to potential ESIP stories working group. Continuing AIST evaluation process.
  • Bruce Caron is now the community architect.
  • Budgets are being turned in.

4. Committee Reports

  • C&B : Ken
  • Discussion and interactions with Erin and Bruce on upcoming C&B efforts pertaining to ESIP organizational changes. No current actions.
  • Finance: Bill
  • Budgets received from 3 groups; 1 other query likely to become a special project request later. Templates and schedule
  • Ficom is reviewing all budgets, and will have things ready to go by October 1.
  • Ficom Chair and Board Treasurer; Bill reports that the Ficom Chair role will expand a bit to include a purview over the larger ESIP funded budget. Bill recommends that the Board Treasurer and the Ficom Chair would be 2 different people on a committee. This would help share the workload and add another perspective to the finances.
  • Partnership
  • Member Handbook is being updated.
  • Data Stewardship
  • A few committee members are completing our writing of an article about identifier use for the special edition of Data Science Journal dedicated to persistent #** identifiers. We expect to submit this month. We canceled our August meeting due to the month, and will devote most of our September meeting to report outs from International Data Week from the ESIP-wide community.
  • Education
  • We will be sharing our draft STEM activities for drones at National Science Teacher Association conferences this fall.
  • We've had a couple good activities contributed for our ebook.
  • Starting at the winter meeting, we intend to launch a series of 10-minute tool demonstrations (webinars that folks can attend live or watch later)
  • IT&I: Ethan
  • Nominations - Job Description Doc This is being drafted.
  • We've received some suggestions; we will meet as a committee in the next few weeks to start finalizing nominations. We're working with the governance team to determine what will be needed, nomination/election-wise, for board. The Nom Com will have a telecon in early October. The Job Description document will help the committee to describe the positions for potential nominees. Please take a look at your position in this document and add your insights. We don’t want to rewrite what can be found in other documents, but having a single document that spells out the duties of each position will be really helpful going forward. Next Steps: Please take a look at the document (Note: this is a living document) and add your information by the beginning of October. Staff will send out an email to all current leaders for their input.
  • Products & Services
  • Preparation for the next RFP, including more targeted advertising through the Types. Soren is doing some outreach to the Type IIs and IIIs.
  • Semantic Technology
  • Independent ontology portal evaluation using ESIP evaluation framework. In the coming year the focus will be on outreach and developing a roadmap to help groups join and take advantage of ESIP semantic technology.
  • Type Rep Reports
  • Type I
  • Type II
  • Type III:
    • Ted reports that they are pulling together a BOF for HDF users at AGU. The idea would include Type IIIs giving short presentations. Bob and Skye will be included in this planning.

5. Other Business

  • ESIP at International Data Week -
  • Please add your ideas, events, sessions etc to this google doc: There will be an email posted on Thursday with this info.
  • Justin will be doing a wrap-up on September 19th at the Data Stewardship call.
  • 2017 Theme proposed:
  • Using the 2nd goal: “Strengthening the ties between observation and user communities.”
  • AMS is going to have a similar theme. Some other topics: social media, crowd sourcing, data ethics? Under the overarching theme, there can be some subtopics that get articulated. Bill Teng had talked about this in an email. Soren had mentioned ethics. Call for a motion: Christine moved and Denise seconded. The motion is approved. The Visioneers will be informed.

6. Committee purpose discussion

  • We are at a point where we need to reexamine what the purpose of committees is? What do we want this to be going forward? The bylaws have descriptions of the committees. ESIP is growing in capabilities and has activities that are bigger than any one committee. Justin is working on a response. Ethan noted that for IT&I the description in the bylaws is too generic. Perhaps a more concrete description would help the committees find their core purpose. Ken noted that new policy and procedure documents would serve this purpose. As a living document it would be more current. More flexibility will be one outcome. It would be nice to maintain an historical record of the changes in the document. The wiki has history on the pages.

7. ESIP Lab discussion

  • The “ESIP Lab” notion is an example of a new capability. There are concerns about reliability and sustainability. How can we make sure that things get done in the space? With staff support and careful planning things can be managed.
  • The “ESIP Lab” would be a home for the test-bed, and other ESIP infrastructure that would work across committees. When we do fund people to do work then there will be a greater need for systems to manage the processes. There are already some management tasks that need to be addressed. The staff will work on this.
  • The idea of the lab is to have standard procedures across the Federation, and to support a minimal infrastructure. How do things evolve from ideas to test-beds to infrastructure that has some sustainable life? What does it mean to have a community resource that ESIP would fund over a longer term. Some discussion about how the OGC does this.
  • Now is the time to capture a simple description of the whole Federation and its parts. The goal is to have draft charters for all the current groups by October 11. Bruce will send out an email to all of the groups.

Any other business? none. Meeting adjourned.