Summer 2010

Evaluation Statistics 2010 Summer Meeting

ESIP Fed Member 64% Agency Contact 5% Sponsor 2% Prospective Member 12% Vendor 2% other 16% Is this your first ESIP? Yes 39% No 57%

What was the goal of your attending the meeting?

Networking 88% Idea Exchange 82% Education/Professional 75% Collaboration with Partners 29% Business Development 14% Funding Opportunities 7% Please evaluate the following: Technical Meeting Excellent 41% Good 36% Fair 9% NA (didn't attend) 7% Open Meeting Excellent 21% Good 43% Fair 2% Poor 2% NA (didn't attend) 23% Plenary Excellent 48% Good 36% Fair 4%

NA (didn't attend) 11%

Committee and Working Group Excellent 20% Good 25% Fair 9% NA (didn't attend) 32% Poster Session Excellent 55% Good 36% Hotel Location

Excellent  68%
   

Good 21%

Presentations Excellent 36% Good 46% Fair 9% Poor 2% Breakout Meetings Excellent 23% Good 48% Fair 14% NA 11% Conference facilities Excellent 43% Good 46% Fair 5%

Quality of Speakers    

Excellent 54% Good 39% Fair 5% Food Quality Excellent 54% Good 41% Fair 4%

Computer Network 

Excellent 29%

Good 38%    

Fair 25% Meeting location Excellent 34% Good 55%

Fair 7%    

Poor 2% What will you be working on after the meeting?

Technical Improved web and enterprise architecture. Improved access to data and services. Better understanding of service casting and data casting; moving forward with Energy Cluster Info Quality Cluster Ontology development for terrain/landforms. For my day job, investigate ESG and how we (GES DISC) can get more involved. Metadata SWEET ontology I will most likely be working on EOSDIS Reference Architecture as well as data interoperability and availability issues at my facility. The reference architecture docs for NASA references architectures Researching and testing the publicly available geo-spatial tools and doing internal evaluations of our own. Learning more about, and implementing semantic technologies in some of our work evaluating what I learned about the user community needs for information Connecting mental models, semantic technologies, and hypertext guided navigation for Earth science data access.

Follow-Up and Collaboration follow up with contacts I made Follow-up with working groups Connecting my specific project, SmartGrid.gov, and other NREL groups with people I met at ESIP. Following through with actions discussed at the conference. some of the collaborations developed at this meeting will carry through to the next meeting Continue networking and collaboration. working with other ESIP members on ideas for sharing their data to users via the web. Geoportal extension can be a part of that. I am most familiar with ESRI solutions, but the ontologies and ideas behind data sharing are more open, and ESIP members expand our understanding of their needs in these areas. Keeping in touch with members. Working on student project funded by ESIP

Committee work Air Quality Community data infrastructure Partnership Committee recommendations to the ExCom, many came from the open session. cluster activities (IQ, Semantic Web, Federated Search) Continuing to work with Data Preservation & Stewardship cluster, but also checking into the Semantic Web and Data Quality clusters. Assignments given at break out Trying to get NREL to become a federation member. Requesting authorization to spend time as an organizer of the Energy Cluster.

Work Related I will be writing some of the data that I found into projects for my students. I may also use some of the lessons that were presented in my class also. Enhancing visualization capabilities of NEO. Continue working on PicturePosts. I went just for the SPG session, so that's what I'll be working on. mathematics and climate science awareness education I will be working on ways to incorporate activities and resources introduced at the workshops into curriculum. I mostly came to understand how ESIP works and what it was all about. I will be talking to others here at Illinois to see if I can drum up interest in additional participation in future events. Website for teacher collaboration. (Friday funding award) NOAA-NCDC (CDR) Climate Data Record project.

What did you get done at the Meeting?

Networking and collaboration Discussions with sponsors and collaborators Networking, secured funding for a student project, and took notes for ESIP federation. networking on newly funded project Networking Meet with people I had only had digital contact with. Great networking. Participated in the discussions. I have given my card and am hoping to actively participate/write papers. Acquire knowledge of technologies, made new contacts I received a wealth of information and some questions to begin to answering.

Presentations and Learning Presentation at working group and poster presentation I was mostly involved with the educators as a presenter so my goal of informing others about the Earth Observatory and NEO was accomplished. Collected info about the types of applications currently available, as well as some unique issues concerning climate change and energy. learned about new technologies and some new agency information Explored internet access to Earth science data and experimented with lesson plan ideas. Outreach for Interoperability standards through technical workshop. good opportunity to get direct feedback on the use case assessment; very helpful to do this face-to-face

Poster Session Comments Good That circular buffet was, though probably not intended, nonetheless devilish! The reception was a great opportunity for interesting discussions. I talked to several graduate students who did very well at explaining their projects to me. I learned quite a lot during the time. This is one of my favorite parts of the meeting. I really enjoy getting to see others' work, plus the social atmosphere and excellent wine loosen folks up. I always make a new friend and learn something I didn't know before. this was a social event for me Great networking opportunity. Thank you for the opportunity to network, and the food! :-)

Bad Some posters were in low-traffic areas along the side corridors. Posters could of been in better locations.

Changes One suggestion: provide a map of the layout of the posters in the handout, with the posters grouped by general topics (e.g., hydrology, technology) and each with a short title. more of the high tables it be able to meet and eat without having to do the balance/spill on your shirt tradeoff Could have used a little more space, but it was certainly adequate. Food and refreshments were a great addition Noted there seemed to be fewer posters this time

What Changes would you recommend? Good None, really. I just wish I had more time so I could attend more of the week! I think it worked very well

Bad some presentations were rescheduled at the last minute so I missed them. Also, not all the breakout agendas were finalized prior to the meeting making it difficult to schedule travel.

Find an easier-to-read program. The start/end times of sessions was really confusing.

My main (perhaps only) complaint: The workshops were not what I consider to be workshops. At least in the case of the Climate Modeling series that I attended. They were more just very extended AGU-like oral presentations. Only exception was the Communicating Your Science workshop, which was what I'd expected from a workshop. Unfortunately, I had to leave early on Thursday, so I missed the afternoon part of it. It was evident that Erin prepared--specifically--for her ESIP presentation. She had several parts to the workshop, but they were all parts of a coherent whole. OTOH, the Climate Modeling workshop also had several parts, but they were more or less separate presentations on specific studies/projects that, though all related to the general topic, didn't come across as parts of a coherent whole. I still got a lot out of the Climate talks, but they were just not quite what I'd expected.

What to do? I'd suggested to either label workshops as something else or provide more specific guidelines to prospective workshop organizers as to how they should prepare their materials.

Better communication about changes to the program and schedule as it evolves

Suggestions More focus on architecture standards & software engineering. Don't shove this to the end. There seemed to be a disconnect in the technical sessions. Some were useful (i.e. reference architecture), some were not (drupal).

Fewer tracks. Our session was sparsely attended and didn't make for a very productive session.

Arrange a field trip or some other social event besides the poster session. People need that to get to know each other better.

tutorial about ESIP itself

I would like to have some opportunity to listen to more of the technical papers as well as the education related sessions.

Cannot think of structural changes at this point. Maybe after the next meeting. I really like 'traditions' such as the poster session, the plenary speakers, the jazz nights on wednesday. Definitely keep those 'traditions' going.

Put all the presentations in one place and clearly advertise that one place. Link to a specific presentation from the related wiki pages. I was extremely frustrated by my inability to find presentations. Most were of such high quality that I wanted to bring them back to our group for discussion.

More information about exactly what will be discussed during the presentations Shorter sessions. Sitting and listening to one person for 90 minutes is a bit too much... imo

At this summer meeting in particular the technical sessions are a real plus. One of the tech sessions I attended turned out more like an AGU presentation session which I didn't appreciate. I really think that the Federation should encourage interactive, discussion sessions, with the talks geared towards presenting technical or programmatic information used in discussion during the working session. the concurrent sessions mean missing multiple topics. I would prefer less overlap fewer parallel sessions. some overview sessions with brief talks on a variety of the technical topics to get new people and managers up to speed on a breadth of issues.

I think more doing and less sitting/listening would be good.

Suggest changes to the water availability. Rather than use a huge number of plastic bottles, especially small ones, how about giving everybody one at the beginning when they sign in, then make water and ice available that can be poured into those bottles. Given the emphasis on climate change, it seemed a shame to have so many water bottles around even though one could recycle...

Clearly defined tracks for Science, Science/IT and IT subjects.

Future Meetings

Someplace interesting

Close to partner institutions to showcase their capabilities.

It might be nice to include an optional field trip to a local lab or research facility.

would be nice to be closer to facilities where we could tour; would have been interesting to learn more about ORNL

back in Tennessee.

not Knoxville

St. Louis

Take a look at our geographical distribution and perhaps choose a location for one of our summer meetings where we are thin (Montana?), or a place that is working actively towards climate mitigation. Someone from Knoxville gave a talk at the Energy cluster on what the city is doing, and that made me think that maybe the Federation could extend a hand to a large community or a region by showcasing their work and our tools and services as part of one of our summer meetings.

Anywhere hilly enough to make the morning runs challenging. OK, seriously, New Mexico (EDAC), NSIDC, New Orleans (flat as it is ...)

Boulder, CO, to entice more scientists from NCAR

somewhere on the East coast

Seattle or Portland would be a neat locale. Or other southern destinations... soft spot in my heart for the Carolinas, or Savannah.

Although not the best location for travel, a meeting held in collaboration with the Grad. School of Library and Info Science and Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign might be a good fit as they are developing a center for environmental data curation (if I remember correctly). At the very least they should perhaps be engaged for next year. I can provide contact info...

No preference, but I liked it being in a small city.

Summer meetings at universities continued

Hawaii, colorado, alaska, boston.

At a location that is easier to fly to. I could not get to Knoxville from Denver without changing planes in Chicago or Atlanta.

Oh you folks choose! You've done a great job so far!

Alaska!

CO, AZ, CA

Santa Barbara, Portland, New Orleans, Ottawa

Newport, OR? Isn't there a NOAA center there? Or Portland, OR. One near west Coast in the West (NW, SW, Central West) and then one in near east Coast (NE, SE, Midwest).

Current policy seems sensible (DC in winter; elsewhere in summer) It would be nice to have summer meetings that include the Midwest as well as the West Coast.

The Gulf Coast would be interesting (New Orleans, for example) - but NOT in the summer. I just got back from a meeting in Orlando and feel permanently parboiled.

Anywhere there is a central airport hub.

topic areas Metrics

more data preservation

metadata

A dialogue between scientists and those in citizen science -- there is so much going on in citizen science, especially with mobile apps and people wanting to help out, yet for the most part, the science community turns their noses up at citizen data, and this is very short sited. Maybe the Federation can broker some dialogue and understanding among these groups as we do between agencies. Global agriculture.

Information quality

Outreach ontology, high-performance computing, visualization, interop

I really like to find out about current research. I also appreciated all of the educational resources that your members have developed.

Web services and data sharing is what i'm most interested in, and I also heard that the communicating your science workshop was very valuable. So, a mix of the technical, but also the applicable, is good.

Continue with energy cluster, but more focus on public access to information. Speakers focus on utility companies was good, but even direct questions asked about public awareness were filtered through the utility company lens by some speakers.

Content management systems

I would like to see an informal, stand-up session where people do 5 minute lightning presentations on emerging tools, technologies, and ideas. Informal as in an evening setting perhaps with refreshments and stand-up as in quick and interactive by design. These are fairly common. for a local instantiation, see http://igniteboulder.com/.

Overall, nice balance of the many threads/themes.

future NASA, ESA, CSA, and JAXA missions

A joint session focusing on high school and undergraduate education if there is an education conference-within-a-conference being held in conjunction with main conference

I would like to see more water related topics discussed.

Continue visualization workshops

More of the same, increasing visibility of data quality is excellent

continued focus on students and teachers to improve science literacy; perhaps learn about successful projects in environmental sustainability and/or adaptation that were aided or enabled because of Earth sensor data???

I enjoyed the focus on policy & education related to Climate change. How about on Disaster recovery -- both short term and longer term?

It would be interesting to get a plenary on the impact of Earth science data on the ECONOMICS of climate change as well as How IT Security Affects the Value of Earth Science Data (including threat models, and such). Climate will continue to draw interest.

Other Comments thanks!

i learned a lot and met many interesting and intelligent people. A really unique and eye opening experience

I just found out about the meeting at the last minute, but the quality of the participants and information made the trip well worth the effort.

In general, ESIP meetings are very organized and well thought out

Thank you for including educators. I think it's important to make the connection between classroom and scientists.

Very good meeting. One of the busiest and most useful that I have attended.

Excellent meeting overall

Appeared to be very well organized. Very nice hotel facilities and very convenient. Appreciated having the option of a hotel for which one could accrue points!