2023-02-01 OpenCI Leadership Meeting Agenda & Summary

Owned by Lavanya Podila
Last updated: Feb 01, 2023 by Dina Meek
3 min read

Attendees:

  • Present: Jay Alameda, Cynthia Dillon, Shawn Strande, Cindy Wong, Ron Payne, Lizanne DeStefano, John Towns, Dina Meek, Lavanya Podila

Agenda/Notes

  1. Debrief on EC meeting@John Towns

  2. Enhance ACO Communications @John Towns (15 mins)

    1. Bi-weekly meeting with the ACO (at least John, Shawn, Jay, Dina and Lizanne) and the awardees?

      1. EC has agreed for bi-weekly meetings with the awardees

      2. ACO will start scheduling 1 hour meetings with the awardees

    2. ACO can send a representative to some of the in-person meetings that the awardees have?

      1. EC has agreed for an ACO member to attend some of their team meetings

      2. Frequency - Perhaps once a month

    3. ACCESS all program meeting, in-person or virtual?

      1. EC agrees to the benefits of in person meetings

      2. Discussion regarding possible options - one annual in-person meeting followed by virtual meetings, quarterly versus semi-annually

      3. Cost is a concern

      4. ACO to come up with a specific plan for program wide interactions

         

  3. ACCESS ACO Quarterly Report @Ron Payne

    1. Schedule & Status

    2. XSEDE to ACCESS Transition

    3. “Benefits & Outcomes Achieved” (2) vs “Services Delivered” (9)?

  4. EAB Updates @Shawn Strande

  5. Evaluation Update @Lizanne DeStefano (Unlicensed)

  6. Communications Update@Dina Meek

    1. Are there any groups we should be engaging with in terms of sharing their events? I.e. International HPC Summer School

      • Here are the groups that XSEDE promoted in past newsletters: Globus, LCI Community Workshop, Science Gateways, ResearchSOC, NSF, PEARC, SC, resource providers, Advanced Computing for Social Change, Computing4Change, The Galaxy Project, CASC, CaRCC, Trusted CI, SRP2021, SciAuth, BSSW Fellowship, SIGHPC, IHPCSS, PRACE-RIST-XSEDE, etc., Campus Champions

  7. Community Engagement Update@Jay Alameda

    1. Converging on a notional Community Building and Engagement Plan (for discussion at next week’s meeting):

      1. ACCESS awards will collaborate on community and community attribute identification

        1. This includes identifying where community information is being held within the program

      2. ACCESS awards will collaborate on community building events, including identification of events, awards interested in participating directly in the events, and contributions from all awards to support engagement on the event (such as printed collateral about ACCESS, upcoming events to offer attendees at the event, etc).

      3. ACCESS awards will bring the “best of the program” to their awards as feasible (eg, if one award develops a DEI plan, all awards will look to this plan for things to adopt for their own award)

    2. updates from 1/25 meeting, for completeness (since we did not discuss them on 1/25):

      1. Terminology and Language Policy - interest from CB&E to see this supported across tracks

      2. Allocations: invited us to review and add to their DEI outreach tracker and planning spreadsheet

      3. Yesterday’s meeting: in spirit of “engaging more deeply with tracks”, “understanding needs and constraints”, and “engaging outside of EC meetings” - devoted the call to focusing on what service areas need from the ACO.

        1. Note that the problem of defining relationships between awards: not a new problem but goes back to (at least) the transition from PACI to TeraGrid (the whole notion of resource providers and their relationship to a central integrator: developed in this context).

        2. ACO: seen as a having a role in streamlining operations, making things more efficient, while allowing service areas autonomy. Analogy to air traffic controller

          1. Note that we may want to build channels to other community building efforts such as NASA TOPS (Transform to Open Science (TOPS) | Science Mission Directorate ) and DOE Office of Science:

            1. eg, NASA offers a significant amount of data via TOPS, we could similarly offer a significant amount of easily-accessed compute resources. Could formalize some of this through the ACO?

        3. ACO: seen as taking a lead on branding and consistency among tracks, including inclusive language policy

          1. Would be good to drive to consistent language so that ACCESS is viewed as a more singular enterprise, and that we have a level of coherence and seamless experience with interactions through ACCESS

          2. Some survey efforts in planning: RPs, AARC, …

          3. Benefit of the CB&E group: taking a ticket not being handled but mentioned in slack directly to the service area contact working in CB&E - and helping to make sure the issue is indeed resolved.

        4. ACO role in communications: lots of point-solution work going on (eg, reaching out directly to many groups about the CSEP program) and risking communication fatigue or lack of recognition that these are ACCESS communications (by virtue of the fact that they are coming from individuals within ACCESS). A lot of interest in working together on coordinated communications, through the ACO.

          1. One idea: ACO builds the base level to create communication channels, and then we all work together to extend these and fill with content

  8. Project Office & Tools Update @Ron Payne

    1. EAB updates completed on Wiki EAB descriptions page and EAB Meetings page.

    2. EAB folder added to ACO Google Shared Drive.

 

Reference - ACO Action Tracker

Next Meeting: 8 February 2023