P&S Telecon - October 20, 2015

November RFP Q&A

Opportunity to ask questions about the November 2015 Testbed RFP

Update provided by Annie B.

We're 3 weeks into the evaluation.
3 Types of evaluation teams:
- Domain scientists - federal sciences
- ESIP-centric team
- Private industry, academic, and a mix
All approaching it differently:
- ARIA-MH, Hook's project
  - Issue with software access and proprietary imagery
  - So evaluation has to happen through Telecons
  - Evaluators look at software and tech that is not at their fingertips
  - Learning how to do that - group call yesterday. Team used the OSF wiki to brainstorm on how to approach this sort of online evaluation
  - Will have two 2-hour long calls with the PI to come up with a Test Plan with the PI
  - And then another call with the PI to execute the test plan, then evaluate if needs an additional call
- Collaborative Workbench, Manil's project
  - Using Slack to collaborate about evaluation
  - Will meet with PI to go through
  - Backend of evaluation hosted on AWS, for the 6 months of the evaluations
- Fusion of Hurricane Models and Observations: Developing the Technology to Improve the Forecasts
  - All evaluators have in-depth knowledge, hit the ground running

Idea: A block of 3 sessions, maybe a full morn/afternoon

Overview, Working Meeting
Evaluators report out
Bring in potential other projects, and evaluators
Talk about next round too - when, how?
Sit down with the group, talk through what worked, what didn't work, and how we can refine this process
Best Practices - for example:
- Regardless of TRL, the PI & the Evaluator should meet the first week to go through the technologies
  - Tech Overview Call
  - Lack of documentation from PI - understand what they are trying to do, vs what evaluator thinks they are trying to do
  - "What are the goals of this?"
  - "If this is your goal, then this is what we see as best practice to accomplish the goal"
What evaluators get out of it:
- 5K in funding and travel to the Winter Meeting to participate, and travel to AGU for the Independent Eval Session
- In the future it might not be 5K b/c of fed limits on accepting salary -
- Might be interesting to think about the Type relationship to the "what do you get" (i.e., Type IIIs, where the budget might be helpful)
Flexibility
- Varying Access and TRL levels

Earth Science Community Testbeds - broader, diff. orgs that have Testbeds
Status, highlight capabilities
Conversation, see if there are collaborative opps
EarthCube Testbed & ESIP Testbed Collaboration discussion
- Support integration of technologies, components and services that support EarthCube infrastructure; cloud platform, evaluation framework
RDA Testbed
OGC Testbed (?)
NDS

Testbed:
- Disaster Lifecycle - Expanding CCOP: Will be supported in Disaster Cluster sessin
- John's Fast Track Project: Maybe highlight as part of AIST session?
Other Projects from November RFP that will be awarded by then - reminder to awardees that they can leverage the Winter Meeting to kick-off
FUNDing Friday Posters
- Nancy to reach out to Brandon Whitehead and Sophie Hou regarding posters and session-related presentations
- Soren and Christine to collaborate on reaching out to other projects

"Templates" for projects
- Scope of work template
- Budget template
- "Adoption" template (see nice example from Beta release of AppEEARS)
Next P&S Meetings: Nov. 17th (Tues before Thanksgiving) and Dec. 15th (before AGU). Nov. 17th OK; for December, we'll check in on Nov. call.
Timeframe for TCB to evaluate proposals: First week of December