2024-12-10 ACCESS EC Meeting Agenda & Summary

Attendees:

• RAMPS: Stephen Deems (v), Dave Hart

• MATCH: Shelley Knuth (v), Alana Romanella

• CONECT: Tim Boerner (v), Leslie Froeschl

• MMS: Tom Furlani (v), Joe White

• RP: Jeremy Fischer (v)

• EAB: Chuck Pavlovski

• OpenCI: John Towns (v), Amit Majumdar, Lavanya Podila, Lisa Kaczmarczyk, Shannon Bradley

• NSF: Sharon Geva, Puri Bangalore

• Guest Speaker: Dina Meek

(v) indicates a voting member

Decisions made during the meeting:

Agenda/Notes

1. Approval of summaries from prior EC meeting John Towns (5 mins)

   1. 2024-12-3 ACCESS EC Meeting Agenda & Summary

   2. some leftover discussions were addressed in emails

   3. no updates
      

2. Supplements John Towns

   1. Any additional discussion

      1. Dina talk about SC goals and what we got out of SC 2024 - do we want to continue to have a presence there? - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ud9_1MychgtE-ABZ_CkaSF3ag6S4vJtPTT_yMl9iOVc/edit#slide=id.p1

         1. Dina ROI Assessment - SC24
            

            

            Scanning - do they automatically become a list member? no - we download to a spreadsheet - and use constant contact to de-dup and then add only the ones that are new
            NOTE: Sharon received a welcome to Access Events email - it did not de-dup her (her NSF account) - Dina will follow up as needed
            Puri - does not see a link to the interview on the website - No they shared it in social media but not on the website - it was a small interview - Dina will see if there is a way to do something on the website
            

            
            

            Do they still base priority on how long you have had a booth - not really - now it is points + how big your booth is - so we are getting pushed down the chain of what we can pick
            We still have points from XSEDE - but corporate sponsors are getting moved up ahead of us
            

            

            Puri - were people coming by to say HI, what is this, have a problem - what kind of foot traffic?
            * it is a mix, but we do get a lot wondering thru who have not heard of us or know name but don’t know what we do
            Shelly has gotten some follow up from people who visited the booth
            Chuck said he saw a lot of younger people coming by - which helps us build to the future
            John - while we are seeing our friends - but our friends generally don’t know what is currently going on in ACCESS
            Dave - we could possibly do booth + what was listed, and being there helps us build with future users and RPs, program and organization people not necessarily end users
            How do you collaborate with ACCESS handout/letter - this should go with us to conferences
            Stephen - there were definitely non traditional people checking us out - people in private industry were checking us out - should we look at “who are we going to focus on this year”
            Dina - several different groups came by to thank ACCESS
            Stephen - 1 uniform thing - people don’t know what ACCESS is - can we do a better job of driving people to our booth - contact in advance
            Shannon - have we put ads in HPC Wire to drive people to us? no - but we could look at it
            Puri - Newsletter before SuperComputing - having a page with all ACCESS people and what they are doing - was helpful to him and his students

      2. IF we will include a request to support outreach at additional meetings, we will need at least a short list from which to down-select.

         1. what are our plans for next year?

            1. ACO just needs supplement for SC

            2. Chipping in on other ones is appreciated! Even sending people still promotes ACCESS

            3. Attendance went from 12,000 to 18,000 - there is an interest across the community

            4. dropping SC - probably is not in our best interest - (is a pretty big risk not to be there) but we should come up with a better outline of plan or goals for booth - maybe we can do something better or different

               1. talk about it in the summer - June or July

               2. start earlier with targets - have it program wide including RPs

               3. Maybe we could consider an in-booth event targeting RPs and potential RPs (with or without catering)

         2. Communicate to Dina - we will go, do more advance planning

      3. PEARC is only 6 months away - should start talking about it in January

      4. Do we want to do to additional events during the year? should we do reconnaissance?

         1. Useful to continue to explore other ones?

            1. Tapia

            2. Sacnes

            3. Hispanic - HACU

            4. NSBE

            5. NSWE

            6. ABRCMS

            7. NAC for BIOEngineering

            8. RMACC - Shelley runs it so she can help us get in - could be a low cost inclusion - put on list + explore a couple more sites (2 or 3)

            9. AMS - Polar AMS

         2. If we want to truly meet our goal of diversifying - we need to go where people are - conferences are that - Is booth most impactful or a talk?

         3. Puri - what about going to AGU - it has over 10000 people coming - most are using some form of HPC

            1. NCAR gets AGU people

         4. How to downselect - people who go to NEURIPS don’t go to the exhibit floor - if NSF has a presence - maybe we could tag along on that

         5. Stephen would like to plug our ACCESS Communications Plan (page 15) that is making an attempt at collecting a collating these organizations 🙂 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gLB6Slt73Adl8FQ_Bm1_YkHvjm-AAczM1ZBdoIfDBy4/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.e0ce5of25nir
            

3. EC Charter last item John Towns

   1. Discuss rotating chair idea. Email worked out much of this

   2. Need to update language in ACCESS EC Charter (December 2024) to reflect how we are proceeding.

   3. Facilitating vs Coordinating vs Rotating Chair

   4. Email discussion - we will work with someone in a Chair vs the facilitating role - thinking doing 6 month stints - Stephen and Shelley are interested

      1. When we do this - do it as an experiment and don’t do any charter changes yes
         

4. Consolidated Review Comments John Towns

   1. Current document: Consolidated ACCESS PY2 Review Comments v4

   2. possible action items/communications added

   3. Need to determine if the EC will take any action items or if we need to send any communications to NSF.

   4. Shelley talked to PIs at SC - she is backfilling a position to target outreach to MSI as part of their goals to increase userbase - there is a lot we can do to then meet goals in the review

Did not cover anything below this line - reminded people to look at program milestones and the EAB nominations

5. EC Program Milestones John Towns (5 mins)

   1. Updates on milestones reporting by Chuck P:

      1. Added comms milestones from list reported by Dina Meek

      2. All milestones updated as per task - ATT-145 - Getting issue details... STATUS

4. Meetings To Do Follow Ups

5. Informational Items (10 mins)

   1. RP Forum Jeremy Fischer

   2. Allocations Stephen Deems

      • Resource Catalog goes live next Monday, December 16

        • Acting on the most pressing feedback; things will still need touched-up after launch

        • Holding off wider promo until the new year

        • Will be most helpful to hear from users post-launch to collect and process feedback

      • “How did you hear about ACCESS?” going into request forms

        • Data will be reviewed regularly by Comms team to provide data for planning efforts

        • Options:

          • Word of mouth (peer or colleague); PhD advisor; Program officer; Organization (campus, workplace, or community group); Conference event; ACCESS website; NSF website; Online discussion forum, blog, or social media; Search engine results; Science news story; Longtime researcher / I already knew about it; I heard about ACCESS from a different source. Please describe _____; Don’t know

      • Phony Allocations requests

        • A few rolling in here and there. Continuing to work with Security on the topic

        • Allocations has some ideas regarding better ways to identify these

          • Would like to talk to Operations about this in the new year regarding any potential changes/safeguards we can make in the ID creation phase

   3. MATCH Shelley Knuth/Alana

   4. CONECT Tim Boerner/Leslie

   5. MMS Tom Furlani

      1. Final stages of interview to bring on new software developer

      2. Working with Lavanya on logistics for Sept Q meeting in Buffalo

   6. EAB Chuck P

      1. submit indications by Thursday

      2. Plan to close on EAB next meeting

   7. OpenCI John Towns

   8. NSF Sharon and Puri

      1. Annual Review - need to start planning - Open to input on style/agenda since it is all virtual
         

Misc Topics:

Next EC Meeting:

• December 17, 2024

Reference:

Risk Register: https://access-ci.atlassian.net/jira/core/projects/RR/board

Project Change Request: https://access-ci.atlassian.net/jira/core/projects/PCR/board