2026-03-17 - ACCESS EC Meeting Agenda & Summary

Open

Decisions made during the meeting:

Agenda

Consent Agenda - Updates for the team that should be completed/read offline

If possible, please fill in this info prior to the meeting - thank you!

Additional Agenda Items

1. Reminder: Input needed by Dina for the Highlights Book (see below). Only Support gets a gold star so far.

   1. From Dina: Send your service area’s achievements according to our overall goals; because we saw overlap in past years among the responses to the five goals, we consolidated to the following three to make things more concise:

      Innovating for Greater Research Productivity

      Facilitating Discovery by Lowering Barriers

      Providing Excellent Support Through Engagement

      Please use these three headings to provide your feedback; we understand you may have more to share for one or two and that’s ok. We prefer running text to bullet points as we may not interpret those accurately (it can be rough – it’s our job to smooth it out). Also, keep in mind that more broadly described achievements might resonate more with readers than anything too in the weeds. Here’s last year’s book for reference. 

      If you have stats we can turn into infographics, that’d also be great. Please share no later than Wednesday, March 11 EOD and do let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

2. Need an EC sponsor for the Comms SC to replace Stephen Deems

   1. Will be Bruno - will let Dina know

3. Need to determine if there is any funding for a PEARC26 sponsorship ($13k)

   1. We cannot use Federal Dollars for this

   2. Tom could not wrangle any money from his DPR

   3. This is the cost of the size of what others are purchasing

   4. Can multiple institutions split the bill for PEARC? All PIs will check

   5. Bruno says there is no ICR at CMU - just so we know

   6. Put back on Agenda for next week

4. Brief update on status of vetting international users (Bruno)

   1. preparing to move forward with tools for screening

   2. have sent plan to NSF - they are discussing

   3. Nathan making plans for development work and implementation

   4. Target July 1 - September - next year

   5. Removing people early and not allowing gmail - sending emails to them - giving them a week - reminding again - and then shutting them down

5. Follow-up or action items from the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting

   1. John - learned - challenge with getting smaller institutions on - they cannot associate with their institutional identity because they don’t participate with Internet 2 - this is a hurdle

      1. Sharon - she has heard this quite a lot - also in the context of students - not just research - also training as well

      2. Shelley - This comes up a lot for us in RMACC as we use ACCESS IDs - also has CCSTAR that gives time and they have issues too

      3. Tom - even for small institutions there is a fee for Internet 2? yes

      4. Nathan - can’t you use ACCESS to be an authenticator? John: yes - but if you have 30 students it makes it too hard

         1. to authenticate is easy - to register … could be hard

         2. the comment was made with “nightmare”

         3. We need someone to review it and make a flowchart with the new registration process

         4. This is what it looked like when ACCESS first started https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1_j-kx630tva4YzJcsy3gwzH4ztPNIbDCNbnJurMompY/edit

      5. Shelley - not necessarily getting an ACCESS ID - but issue is that for some systems that is not the only thing you need to do to get access - Jetstream is the exception - some require you to sign in another way and there is a 2 step process - there is not a requirement for all RPs to have a singular way of logging in - she heard this from the panel and this could be a large part of it - people get lost between the 1st and 2nd

      6. Tom - add this for next meeting - when Eric and Virginia will be here to discuss login

      7. John - disappointing - feedback on operations - true in access as well - people kept asking for things we have already done - means we have not effectively communicated with them and made it easy to find - ex. sample proposals - and how to put one together - this person could not find it - the only way they could find it was by using the YouTube channel

         1. we need to do better for NAIRR documentation - is the NAIRR chat working like ACCESS chat?

      8. Tom - to use the ACCESS chatbot you have to log in - that is because of data privacy (especially required in Kentucky)

         1. Can there be a separate chat bot for non-authenticated users? and it changes upon login?

      9. Joe - Questions about what is NAIRR allocated vs ACCESS allocated resources - and what the distinction is

      10. Shelley - ACCESS was not a centerpiece for that conference - Dave Hart gave the talk on Allocations for the conference and he is not part of ACCESS any more.

      11. Sharon - Talked to Ken and Nathan and John - realized we have 6 workshop awards - 1 has happened - was made more aware of them as she is now managing them - there are 6 different communities - Is working on the community college one now and sent info to Nathan and Ken. Asked one if it would make sense to have connections with ACCESS - it would be worth having some kind of power point that can be shown at these event by someone who knows ACCESS. We can show up and talk about it, but it would help if someone who is from ACCESS can come in and talk about it.

          1. What would be helpful for them in the 6 communities to communicate with

          2. Tim - our community knows us - but we have not reached out to EDUCASE - EDUCASE 26 is in Denver - we could combine a late quarterly meeting with that conference

      12. Bruno - doesn’t want to do outreach just because we can do it - his data does not support reaching out to community colleges

      13. Shelley - we are looking at this wrong - ACCESS and XCEDE before it - etc. many people need these computational resources - others need the informational resources - community colleges don’t do a lot of research like this - there is not a magical email list that will let the right people know about all the right things

      14. Tom - Sharon is looking for a 10 min ppt to get to an audience we have not been able to reach before - if we had wanted a way in - she would be glad to help

6. Standing Committee Reports

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Next Meeting: Mar 24, 2026

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