Transcript:
Computing and Software Coordinating Panel for the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society
Task Force Plenary
1/11/24
>> Ian: All right. Am I sharing the screen?
>> Liz: Yes.
>> Ian: Excellent. Okay.
>> Joel: So, just out of curiosity, enabled closed captioning -- and I see myself talking.
>> Amanda: Yes, that was me.
>> Joel: And I see Ian's comment and the ones I just made.
>> Ian: Maybe it's because I'm sharing my screen, I'm not seeing anything in the way of captioning. But if other people are, that's great.
>> Joel: Yes, I'm reading what you're saying.
>> Ian: Okay.
>> Joel: Liz is on also.
>> Ian: And shall we -- shall I hit the record button.
>> Joel
>> I think you can probably wait until the meeting starts.
>> Liz: Yeah, Ian, for your knowledge, you have to enable it in your settings. So, it wasn't done when I first came in. And then I went and changed my setting and now I see them.
>> Ian: Okay, on the Zoom account?
>> Liz: For me, it was in the more section, there's a section that says captions. And I clicked on that.
>> Joel: Yeah, the task bar at the bottom for me said -- has a CC --
>> Ian: Yes.
>> Joel: Button.
>> Ian: I saw --
>> Joel: I hit that and I saw the captions. In the box. In the caption box. The only thing that's supposed to happen or is there a window.
>> Ian: I think that's what's supposed to happen. And also, I believe -- did people get a warning that the meeting is being recorded? Because mine says that it is. Pause recording or stop recording.
>> Joel: I certainly got a thing that said the meeting was being recorded and clicked on it.
>> Ian: Okay. Good. It is --
>> Joel: There's an icon in the upper left corner.
>> Liz: Left.
>> Yeah, I see that too.
>> Ian: Okay. I'll take your word for it. With the screen share on I get not as much visibility as I often do. Okay.
>> Joel: But if we hit "Chat" -- somewhere there's a window, I thought, that had your transcription, Amanda.
Joel: Okay. Do what you said and I'll follow your instructions. [View full transcript will open the transcript in Zoom, the link in the chat will open another window in a browser]
>> Ian: Okay. We... are a punctual group.
>> Liz: So, I saw Charles' message that he can't unmute which is interesting because this is the second meeting I have been in where I have been able to unmute and Charles has not.
>> Ian: I don't think I have the ability to unmute anybody, even as the host of the meeting. Hm. Though everyone -- like can people verify -- most of you are muted. Can you try to unmute and see how that goes?
>> Yeah. I can unmute.
>> It's --
>> For me --
>> Hello?
>> Ian: All right, okay. So, I think we're doing -- okay.
>> Amy: I have recently had problems un-muting if I tried to unmute before I select "Okay, I realize you're recording."
>> Ian: Oh!
>> Amy: See if that banner is still up.
>> Ian: Yeah, that we recognize that we're recording.
>> Liz: That was it, he said.
>> Ian: Okay. Great. Okay.
>> Charles: You have to agree to being recorded before you can unmute.
>> Ian: We have 20 participants which I think is about what I was -- within one of what I was expecting. So, maybe we're all here? In which case, Joel, should we get started?
>> Joel: I would say so.
>> Ian: Great! Let's get started. I am Ian Fisk. And this is the Foundation Task Force for the Coordinating Panel of Software and Computing opening meeting. And why don't we -- let's get started.
So, first thing is: What is going on? So, we are asked, as a Committee, to -- with the task of defining a Coordinating Panel for Software and Computing. This is similar to the coordinating panel on advanced detectors which has operated for more than a decade. They are under the umbrella of DPF and subject to the bylaws. They have complementary goals, not exactly the same. But I can talk about. The idea for the panel came from the desires of many members of the Community. But came up throughout Snowmass process specifically. We have added the conveners, Daniel Elvira, Steven Gottlieb, Ben Nachman, they will be advisers to the Committee, one or two is on the call. We have a charge, we have a committee, we have a schedule, we have a goal. The Committee, that's you all. The goal is to -- is a coordinating panel definition which is a document that is less than 50 pages long. That we have a -- the document that was prepared for the advanced detectors which is mounted on the Indico as a guide. Though I think there are some things that are probably specific to us.
And our schedule is to complete our task in about 4 months. So, why are you here? Many of you maybe wondering what life choice use made that arrived at this particular spot. And I can give you small consolation with the knowledge that it probably wasn't your fault. That most of you were here because you were nominated by someone. Some nominated themselves, but many came from somewhere else. We had about 60 nominees for the panel and we tried to -- we went through this by basically choosing from the list of 60 nominees, we looked at the number -- we chose another Committee of senior people to go through the list and try to choose a balanced panel. And we chose the names that came up the most times, that was our first pass and adjusted a little bit. It was to make a Committee balanced between big and small universities, and big and small experiments, the various frontiers, gender, early or late career and a balance between theory and experiment. The goal behind that was the Committee was to be of benefit to the larger community. And if we had a representative slice of the Community in all locations that we would end up with a better scope and a better Committee.
So, that's why you're here. So, why are we doing it had? If you look through the charge, there's a set of specific questions and we will go through those. But I tried to take sort of a step back. And look at the big questions of why we were doing this. And sort of one of the more for me was can we provide ways to gather and communicate the priorities of the community to the agencies themselves? And can we provide a structure that helps predict future trends and guides evolution across the community, specifically in computing and software? Can we document progress, assess best practice and foster communications across the community in the areas of computing and software? And can we enable information sharing and cooperation across scientific domains? And how can we help prepare the community for the challenges ahead? And can we help in career progression for the community members, for those who devote their sometime in software and computing, how to make sure their contributions are recognized? And develop and maintain a more diverse and inclusive workforce and can we recognize and reward extraordinary contributions? If you look at the charge, many of them are more detailed versions of these.
But whether trying to figure out why we make such a Committee, I thought there was some value in taking a couple steps back. And because of that, I would sort of like to pause here for a moment. We'll go through the questions in the charge, but I wanted to pause in case there were big cross-cutting questions that people thought that I had missed. Because this is supposed to -- as a Committee -- we are supposed to have a set of high-level goals. Those with my initial pass at them, if people feel that I have missed anything important, they should -- like they're welcome to say now. And Maria has raised her hand.
>> Maria: Yeah, I have like a stupid question. Have you shared the list of Committee members with the rest of us?
>> Ian: In the sense that they were the Committee members, they were -- they were in the emails that I sent to you at the top. But I'm happy to make a more formal list than that. So, would -- they were in -- they were in my email. I'm at the top. Before we had a mailing list, I was including everyone. But I'm happy to go through that quickly now or I'm also happy to include that in documentation from the meeting later, whichever you prefer.
>> Maria: Yeah, I'm looking at the list. There are maybe 12, 15 people on there. But we have 20 plus on the meeting. I'm a bit confused.
>> Ian: People there -- but let's see... well, how about -- how about this? Why don't I -- let's -- I don't want to stop sharing just because I -- when we are doing with this part of the discussion, we will go through the spreadsheet that has everyone's name on it. If that's okay?
>> Liz: That sounds good. Is it public information? Is like -- if we're talking to other people outside of this group, are we allowed to share who is on it?
>> Ian: I believe so. It's not a deeply --
>> Liz: Okay.
>> Ian: We didn't publish the names except in the email we sent to people until they had said yes. So, when the individual invitations for the Committee were sent to individuals so that they -- in case they said no, and several people did, that they would not be -- that they weren't on the list. But I think the people who said yes are -- that's not a big secret.
>> Liz: Okay. Thanks.
>> Ian: Okay. Tulika
>> I guess with my DPF Secretary hat, if you want to give a brief for the newsletter which is next week? Because it was a call to the DPF Community for nominations. Maybe you want to summarize where things are.
>> Ian: I will let Joel comment on that.
>> Joel: I think that's an excellent idea and that we should do it.
>> Tulika: Thanks.
>> Ian: That would allow us also, in case people thought they had wished to participate in and weren't selected, that would give them a channel, a conduit for people to talk to to make sure their concerns are being addressed. Just a few minutes -- just a few moments on the make up. We, of course, there were 60 people proposed. All of whom had interesting inputs and things that had -- points of view. We tried to make sure that we did not end up with a Committee of 60 people and that we are -- and that we were also trying to make sure we had a reasonable balance across all the various axes that we were trying to get input from. The fact that someone was not selected for the committee was not an indication that their name didn't come up and they weren't valued by their colleagues. It was that we had more people from a particular area and fewer in another and we had to make some choices.
So, hopefully I -- I hope very much the people will see this for what it is. That this was a service task and that the fact that they were off the hook is not a bad thing. Peter, how are you?
>> Peter: Fine, thank you. Can I ask two things in terms of your 14 questions that sprang to my mind. The possibility or relationship of engaging with the computing industry and/or the kind of ask our domain check sector.
>> Ian: Okay.
>> Peter: It might be enormously more powerful if there's some kind of reach out to industry steering or whatever. Or the super computing ASGAR community.
>> Ian: I will make that, it's one of the 14 questions in the charge, but I will include that and the HPC community into the general sections too. Charles?
>> Charles: Could you go back to the last slide, please?
>> Ian: Sure.
>> Charles: Yeah. So, the only thing which I have to say about -- my comment on this is that can we recognize and reward extraordinary contributions? And I don't think we should limit that to just extraordinary contributions. I think we want to make sure that we recognize and reward, you know, contributions across the board.
>> Ian: Okay. Ordinary contributions as well.
>> Charles: I think that's very important that we support the community from start to finish.
>> Ian: Okay. That's a good point. I will make that modification. So, the idea behind that particular thing was whether there was a -- like one of the things the advanced detector group did was to make awards that were supported externally. They were financial awards, I believe. So, the question is whether we want those as part of our Committee as well? And so, I think it was a matter of sort of exemplary service awards. But I agree that we should be making sure that we are recognizing contributions across the way. Whether they are extraordinary or not. Amy?
>> Amy: Yeah. So, I think that this might already be embedded in several of these bullet points. But I'm wondering if there's a role here for, like, supporting the work towards developing the tools that we need in the future? So, for example, the second bullet point has like predicting future trends and guiding evolution. But there's not sort that have aspect of like, you know, supporting a coherent set of projects or identifying how to support a coherent set of projects. Anyway, so, I just wasn't sure if that was already in here or if that's not in scope or if that is in scope, but it's just not explicitly called out?
>> Ian: I think it's probably -- it's a -- it's worth putting in. We need to be careful how we define it because as we'll talk later, there are -- as we -- we get to make -- I think we get to make recommendations about research programs, but we don't necessarily get to define them because if we don't, we are not an agency. And so -- but at the same time I think there is -- by calling out specifically that can we help sort of guide a coherent research program for the future is a worthwhile thing to put in.
>> Amy: Okay. I think this also might be how can we help the community plan for the challenges ahead. Yeah, thanks.
>> Ian: All right. Other questions or comments? Yeah?
>> Ruth: So, there falls under the career progression planner and I don't know if we want to be more explicit. But in the P5 area recommendations for workforce development, they recommended like increasing the workforce of research software engineers and other professionals. But I think we hopefully all agree that it's important to, you know, maintain and potentially increase the workforce of scientists who are doing computational research. And that it's not, you know, this thing that people think, you know, okay. Well, we just need, if we hire enough programmers, you know, it's all solved. Like real scientists who know about physics, you know, need to be leading the effort.
>> Ian: And so, that was my thought. That was my thought behind can we help the career progression for the community members who devote their time to software and computing.
>> Ruth: Yeah, and I figured that was in there, I wanted to make the progression maybe at some point when we're writing the full document we can be more explicit about what --
>> Ian: Yeah. I think and one of the things that I was hoping with this particular set of big questions was how is it that we sort of -- I don't have a great phrase for this yet, but basically make sure that those contributions -- the contributions for -- in software and computing as a domain scientist are as important as other kinds of analysis or detectability. I think one of the successes of the detector project Committee was basically to do exactly that. To talk about -- to sort of raise the profile that have particular activity. And I think we need to figure out how to do that in software and computing as well. In the same way that someone won't say necessarily we need to hire more engineers who are exclusively for building detectors. We need to make sure that we're not proposing offloading this also. That we maintain an expertise in this ourselves. Jan?
>> Jan: Yeah, thanks. I'm wondering how we deal with training and maybe even education. Is that in our purview or not? I think that would be an important question to deal with.
>> Ian: I think there are some things in the main 14 questions. But yes, I think we could put a high-level question also about our role in facilitating training and workforce development. Peter, did you put your hand up and then take it down?
>> Peter: Yeah, I was just going to support what Ruth said. You know, I view software development as often a key part of being a skilled domain scientist, right? And there is a danger in, you know, past lives that I've seen where the direction gets labeled as a third track or a separate track from being a scientist. It's very, very important that we recognize the scientific value of developing the software. We need people who know the science to correctly develop the software. It's just one of phrasing that we need to make sure that this is not a diversion from being a scientist, but a cool part of being a scientist.
>> Ian: Right. I think that's a good point. We need to be careful as we try to elevate the importance of this role that we don't kind of make it external. That we maintain the importance while keeping it as part of our -- the core.
>> Peter: Yep. Recognizing the scientists alongside all the other scientific activities.
>> Ian: Anybody else? Good. Good. Let's move on, then. So, did we cover this part? So, of the 14 questions which were in the scope which you've all seen, I tried to divide it into a variety of categories which then I tried to put into an outline.
And so, these are the ones that were about membership and stakeholders. So, the first is the panel representation and member and how the membership of the panel should be determined? How should the stakeholders will represented in the panel? I don't think that we need to discuss the answers to these questions, but these will become the questions that we need to answer in the text of the report. And so, what is the appropriate size? If you look at the original size proposal of the advanced detector panel, it was about 12. With the explicit mix of lab versus university personnel. Should there be -- they were -- the questions to us were: Should there be different categories of membership? Full members, observers, technical consultants? Different types? I think over the years the original 12 have also been added to, and if you look at the -- there's a special committee from the detector side that's designed and work with SBIRs. So, there may be -- we may have a variety of roles. And there were some questions about general communication. So, what mechanism should the panel be using for communicating meetings, town halls, workshops, studies, tutorials, training? And basically I think most importantly is what entities should the panel be communicating with? And we need to discuss that a little bit also in the general -- in how we begin to formulate the report.
And then identify stakeholders. So, again, this is sort of related to it. Which is the scientific collaborations, grassroots organizations, institutes and centers, community leaders, funding agencies. In the case of the scientific collaboration, the list of the kinds, not with the specific ones because the length of time of the Committee is expected to run for longer periods of time than -- or some of these are very long-lived, but the idea is that it spans across boundaries. And again with community leaders, we're talking about roles, not individuals.
So, the next sort of broad set of sections from the report is communications and partnerships. So, what are the methods by which the panel can help with community coordination in the approach to software and computing issues? Communications across funding agencies and what roles should the Committee play in facilitating communications with and across different funding agencies? As an external Committee, what role we play also may be -- like we can propose roles. And they -- but I think that's also a negotiation as with the relevant parties as to what our role is expected to be. And partnerships. Comment on the role of the CP SC is encouraging and facilitating strategic links to computing research institutions, industry, and other scientific communities.
The next section I had was basically diversity and career development. So, diversity was comment on the role of evaluating and promoting DEI in software and computing in HEP. Should the Committee support studies and suggest policies? Looking at the advanced detector, at least in the initial report that was done more than a decade ago, this is sort of -- this is -- I didn't see this there. I think it's more of an indication of the -- not that it's unimportant, it's just that it's a different time. And so, this is a section that I specifically called out as a dedicated section of its own that's different from career development. And in terms of career development, what mechanisms should the Committee use to promote discussion on career development, including recruitment, training, and retention and HEP-specific job categories to improve opportunity and sustainability? And should we be creating awards to recognize the work of early career and/or established scientists in science and computing? Suggest the auspices under which such programs might be created. One of the nice things about software and computing, we have reasonable ties to industry. We might be able to get those kinds of awards and recognitions supported in meaningful ways. Which are sometimes those are very helpful in terms of people's career development.
In terms of -- I think this is the last of the four categories which is technology, R&D and sustainability. So, comment on the roles of the CPSC in promoting domain expertise and partnerships between institutions. And how we should facilitate coordination on R&D and across discipline boundaries from prototype to production. This is like what we talked about before in terms of working on how to facilitate R&D programs. And some of us were recommended in the Snowmass report. And how to promote sustainability and energy efficiency? Things that are the energy efficiency in computing is an important topic as well. And then emerging technologies and the transition process. How do we facilitate the coordination efforts of enabling the transition to newly established or emerging technology. Again, this ties back into the idea of OSCAR and HPC, but also new techniques, machine learning and et cetera. This was a little bit separate from the others, which was software sustainability and how should the Committee facilitate coordination of long-term development, improvement, maintenance, and use support of existing essential software packages as always recommended in the report. That's a specific area and may merit a specific treatment in the report itself.
So, and this is up for discussion. Maria, please go ahead.
>> Maria: So, just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Maria Elena. Second thing is we're not stuck with the name, right? I keep seeing it pop up. You cannot pronounce it and you're a native speaker? Can we all agree that we cannot start with this name?
>> Ian: That's an being question, I believe we're stuck with the name and can practice with the acronym?
>> Joel: Can I make a comment on that? I asked the CPAD people how they got the name CPAD. They had a terrible name originally in their report. If you look in their report, it will be something like "Detector something management group" or something. And it was worse than what we have. And what nay did was they organized a contest for the name. And came up with CPAD which is a nice thing because it's easy to say and easy to remember. And almost sounds like a word, right? A two-syllable word. So, I think we always assume that we could do something like that. Now, who they -- whose opinion they asked for I don't know. So, we'll ask them, but we could make an independent judgment on that. But we are not stuck with the name. And I completely agree with Maria Elena.
>> Maria: Having worked with NASA for almost two decades, when I see an acronym that nobody can pronounce, I think it's -- but my NASA training.
>> Ian: We will put it on the list. This is something that might be reasonably discussed. This seems like a thing we could debate also over email as well. We will talk about what the next steps are. But I think new acronym is -- we'll put it on our list.
>> Joel: Yeah, they used it to get interest in the community. As I said, they had some kind of a broader competition. It was kind of interesting. You know, we did something like that for the Snowmass logo. And we got a lot of entries for that. So, it's not, you know, I mean, it's certainly possible to do it broadly. We could also do it more narrowly.
>> Ian: I'm interested to see how this goes. It's a jaded time. I'm just trying to avoid ending up with Boaty McBoatface.
>> Joel: They didn't do it when they produced the report. They did it afterwards. The report has the bad name that I discussed, I just can't remember what it was.
>> Ian: Okay. It's lost to history because it was so terrible.
>> Joel: At somebody's -- at Peter's request and others, that's now in the Go site. Their documents. So, you can see what they originally called it. That's the name it has in the document, I think. It's not called CPAD.
>> Ian: Okay.
>> Joel: In the document.
>> Ian: Okay. So, Maria, we will work on a new name. And then in terms of the initial outline, and this again -- this is a very much a draft. It doesn't match especially well to the CPAD report. I don't think -- I don't know if that's a problem or not. The CPAD report is -- if you read it, it's a lot of individual recommendations in specific areas which we can think about how we want to do that. Charles, go ahead.
>> Charles: Just a question. So, the CPAD's been around for more than a decade now. Has its mission statement ever been re-examined or updated? Or is it a static thing or is it a flexible mission statement? Has there ever been an official attempt to re-evaluate it? Should we say something about our time frame? Because certainly our field tends to change rather rapidly.
>> Ian: That's probably also a question for Joel who as the keeper of the -- like, Joel, any?
>> Joel: So, I am not an expert in how CPAD is evolved. But I know at the organizational level they have adapted. They have certainly, you know, there's a piece of this that will go into the D PF bylaws, not much, just a few paragraphs. They have changed their organization. Added sort of structure to it. Sort of built it out horizontally and a little bit vertically. And I think that that's expected and they do that when they do that and it gets obvious enough, we update the DPF bylaws. Whether they've updated their mission statement, I don't know. But that will be an interesting question because, you know, they've now -- the whole detector community is reorganizing around this concept of RDCs and somehow their own -- the US study, the European study, have come up. So, I think that the answer is that if the community discusses it, they would have to propose a -- a change to the charge that would go in one paragraph or two will go into the D PF bylaws. It could be changed, I don't see any problem with that. It shouldn't be changed often because the DPF bylaws have significant inertia to get approval asks things. You wanted to comment?
>> Ian: One of the things I wanted to comment, if people find it to be helpful, would it make sense to find someone who was involved for a long period of time in CPAD and have a discussion about what -- when they were defining the committee, what was successful? And what took a while to get off the ground? Basically what the experience was in the hopes of not making the same mistakes. I didn't neonatal how people would feel about that, but as we go through our tasks to get some input from that community what they found to be effective ways of working. Charles, is that a -- that's a thumbs up. Okay. So, that's a -- great. Okay. So, we'll try to do that.
All right. Okay. So, going through just sort of the initial outline -- and this is mostly the initial outline as it will become obvious in a second as to why it looks like this. Is it was broken into course categories. The idea being that we could start as committee filling in not the text, but simply the contexts that should be included in these sections. Once we started reading on what the concepts were, then actually writing the report is a more tractable task. So, of course, instruction and motivation, executive summary which probably will get written last. But then the membership and the committee makeup, the size of the committee, how they are chosen, how it is renewed. Basically bylaws-type of things. Communications and partnership. Who should we will engaging with as a panel. And how? And the engagement with the agencies and projects. So, that's from -- I think that's a very important part of the Committee. The technical working groups. This would be like one of the tasks of this Committee is potentially to make reports, to track progress. That is oftentimes an effective way of communicating with the agencies. And so, if you look at the CPAD, they have produced a number of reports and a number of workshops. And so, defining what those might be, those are certainly likely to evolve as technology evolves and changes. But at the same time, the concept behind them and what they might do is probably is longer term. And then career development. So, again, the things we talked about before in terms of promoting the discussion on career development. And finally, DEI activities as the last one.
So, that's that. And I'm also -- I'm happy like so what I -- before we go on a little, let's do one more slide. And there is basically -- are there things that we shouldn't do. Because if you look at the CPAD report, they specifically call out things that they were not going to do. And there are -- in our charge, you read it, there is a section, and I have reordered that because I was finding that the way it was written in the charge, it seems a little bit too much like a riddle to me. Where it's like, you're this, but sometimes you could be this, and so I tried to streamline it a bit. But the idea is there's not a budget of this, we are not a funding agency. But we might be asked by a funding agency to administer funds. If that was approved, this is acceptable. There are things that we are not, but we might still function in those ways. We are not a provider of computing services. Specifically, we also don't have a budget. We do not execute projects ourselves, but we may help assemble or convene groups of people who do. And we may sponsor activities that aid in communication and coordination such as workshops or meetings for schools and promote similar tasks sponsored by other organizations. Undertake initiatives that advance software and computing and fall within the mission of the DPF. It does not by itself select among competing projects or approaches or directly make decisions or recommendations. If you look at the CPAD report, there is a strong connection with the SPIR program. I'm assuming that they provide guidance, but they would not be the ones who were making director decisions or maybe even recommendations about such groups. Except if directly asked by a funding agency, they can respond directly or more likely a arrange a task force or committee to produce a response. Yeah, Adam?
>> Adam: The first item, if asked by an agency or organization to administer funds for a specific purpose, is that also in the CPAD charge? And do you have examples? If so, do you have examples of when they were asked to administer funds? That seems to me like a can of worms that would require a lot more thought if that is going to happen.
>> Ian: I do not know the answer to either of those questions, but I will find out.
>> Joel: I think that was a bit of a misstatement. They are asked to do things that are effectively recommendations on funding. Such as, I think, that they are asked to comment on -- and are very influential in choosing people for certain fellowship programs.
>> Adam: Okay.
>> Joel: That was a mis-casting by those of us who worked on this of that. I doubt that we will have to administer funds or that we even should.
>> Adam: Okay. I think if we get into -- if this panel gets into distributing funds, that requires a lot more work. But it sounds like that's not the case.
>> Joel: We might be asked to recommend on things that resulted in that.
>> Adam: Right, but that's different than itself.
>> Ian: Logistically, we don't have an infrastructure to do that.
>> Adam: Right.
>> Joel: With the infrastructure in DPF, even a modest program would stretch DPF infrastructure and support way too thin. So, I think we need to reformulate that. That's probably my fault.
>> Ian: Yeah.
>> Adam: One could imagine receiving funds to host a workshop or things like that.
>> Joel: Yeah, that was one of the things that came up.
>> Adam: I'm sorry?
>> Joel: That was one of the things that came up and frequently you can get some support for a workshop as we did for Snowmass. We effectively -- at the time that this was written, we were struggling with reimbursements for funds that we got from the agencies to support particular aspects of the Snowmass summer study. So, in some sense, we were administering funds. And that was extremely awkward, incidentally.
>> Charles: So, how does that work with the last item on slide four about recognizing and rewarding extraordinary contributions?
>> Joel: That is funding and if it's provided, it's likely to be provided by DPF or DPF with some external entity supporting it. I hope I said the right thing. Somebody more knowledgeable about this, if they're present might want to comment.
>> Tulika: Sorry, since I heard DPF, I had a phone call. Could you repeat the question, please?
>> Joel: They wanted to know about essentially prizes that we might have were funded? That we would administer those funds and we do it through DPF, is that correct?
>> Tulika: We actually don't provide any monetary funds for CPAD. From the DPF point of view, we give a certificate that is awarded to the -- and their travel is supported to go to the CPAD. So, in that respect. It's slightly different.
>> Joel: Right. These might wind up being a little bit more like -- because we don't honor computing people or physicists who do computing in these things easily, these might be things that are more like DPF awards. They could be.
>> Tulika: Then we have to figure out where the money for that would come from. Because it's not part of the DPF budget.
>> Joel: Right.
>> Ian: I think we would look for external funding sources.
>> Tulika: That would be great.
>> Ian: Jan, if you want to speak?
>> Jan: No, it was pretty much covered by the last point.
>> Ian: I think Ruth was next?
>> Ruth: With regard to the funding thing, my thinking is there's distinction between allocating funding for an award, a nominal amount versus -- and versus funding actual research. I think that's clearly a giant can of worms that nobody would want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
>> Ian: Right, the distinction between those things, I would describe the things we can do and can't do. The things we can do would be to arrange there was a small award for someone. Things we can't do -- we don't -- we don't want to be -- nobody wants us to be involved in sort of -- in allocating research dollars, I don't think.
>> Ruth: I guess to me, I'm reading administer funds for a specific purpose seems really vague and it would be nice if there was a little bit more clarification in whatever verbiage there is about like what --
>> Ian: I agree. I think maybe it would make sense. I will rewrite this. We are not a funding agency with a budget is clear. And I think the -- the statement that should follow it is that if asked by the agencies for opinions on research topics not -- or that we -- that we might serve in an advisory role if asked. And that would be sufficient, I think.
>> G. J.: And CPAD said they never had any funding, is that correct?
>> Ian: I think so. But they were asked bit agencies to contribute opinions on the SBIR program.
>> G.J.: Should we ask people there if there was a place -- just ask the opposite question -- where if they had funding it would be useful to grease the wheels of just how the organization works?
>> Ian: Yeah. Though -- there's sort of the logistical running of the show and then there's sort of the much broader like what agency, et cetera. And we need to make sure that we stay on the right side of that.
>> G.J.: But the CPAD workshop thing is basically just somebody volunteers to host it. And then they do it all through sort of meeting fees. Is that how those things have been done? Do we know?
>> Joel: So, I don't know the answer to that. But I know that it's not uncommon for specific proposals to be put into DOE or NSF or more frequently for early career scientists to attend or something like that. Which was part of the motivation for some of the discussion around that first bullet. But these are small things and they're not -- they're not, you know, really judgments about -- about quality of research or something like that.
>> G.J.: I was thinking of the mechanics of making it work. Not as a funding pass through entity itself.
>> Ian: And before I go to Peter, Giordon put on to the chat, which I saw a second ago, this sounds similar to what the US LHC users association does: Lightning talk winners are given certificates where their travel to DC lobbying is covered by URA, but I don't think USLUA actually has funds themselves. This probably goes back to going -- talking -- we should find out from CPAD how they have done this. But also, we should have a bit of a discussion, I think, as to whether like given our connections with industry, if we had the ability to sort of have small directed things that had a little bit of support, it -- there might be a value to that.
Peter?
>> Peter: Yeah, I was just going to advocate decoupling the discussion of funding for any awards. I mean, what we can do as a community -- what we can do as a panel, whatever, is to award prestige to identify important contributions, software packages, whatever. And if someone has money to support that, that would be great in the future. But we could still make the prestigious selection or identification of people who are really contributing independent of whether or not it's funded and then hopefully it can be funded.
>> Ian: Agreed. Tulika?
>> Tulika: This goes back to the research projects. I have been participated in CPAD and was one of the conveners in workshop. What I thought they did well is they had a workshop report that is a pretty comprehensive document that comes afterwards. And they are in good connections with the program, at least with the DOE, Helmut Marsiske, and reads those and appreciates those reports and he uses that to actually try and justify various FOAs that might then come out for which people can then ask for money. But there is a connection, but it is in a very different way than we are talking about.
>> Ian: Thanks, Adam.
>> Adam: I responded in the chat. There's no need to --
>> Ian: Yes, okay. Great. Okay. All right. So, in terms of next steps, I made a Google Doc with the -- basically the draft outline installed. That's also accessible from the Indico link. Everyone should have editing privileges to it. Probably the simplest is to put in the suggestion mode so change tracking is turned on. It is intended for brainstorming and getting concepts down. When you click on it, you will see that the categories are listed. There's a space for two kinds of volunteers. One of which I call the members and one of which I call the auditors. There's not a huge distinction between either of those. But I was hoping everyone could assign themselves to at least one as a member. And if you're interested in contributing to another, as an auditor. And when we're having discussions about the actual text and the report, we may find scheduling easier if we can schedule in smaller groups and report back to the larger group. Everyone should feel at this stage that they have absolute encouragement to contribute to any of the sections and that -- but there are specific things that you care about or would like to be involved in, that would be great. At some point, we will be looking for people who have the bandwidth to serve as a coordinator for a section which would be extremely helpful. And so, if there are things that you feel that you could contribute to, if you put your name down, then that's an opportunity to step up next.
So, ideally, people would choose member and an auditor section. And say, it could be anywhere. The final document will be prepared probably in Overleaf as we get a full set of content. The Google Doc was really a way to get jump started. And I mope very much that it will be very rough and very bullets, points that need to be covered that I have forgotten, people's notes on the topic. And that we will as -- in a couple of weeks we will see where we are and then begin to sort of figure out how to make a more structured document. Liz?
>> Liz: Yeah, I was wonder for you could say a few words defining what a member is versus an auditor? Like do you mean like an auditor like an editor? And the member is actually writing? I mean, what actually are we talking about?
>> Ian: It's a little simpler than that, I think. Actually.
>> Liz: Okay.
>> Ian: The idea behind it, if we were to divide it up and there were an equal balance between sections, there would be three or four people per section. And if we wanted to have a meeting, it would be important that those people were there. The auditor would be much like auditing a class. It would be desirable if they were there, especially if they could contribute. But it might not be there -- like if they couldn't make that meeting, they would sort of --
>> Liz: Okay. So, you mean like auditing a class. I just didn't understand. Okay. Thank you.
>> Ian: That was my -- the idea was that there were -- yes. And that there -- allowed -- it was a system that allowed people -- and if people feel very strongly about more than one section and would like to say they are a member of that section, we would make the schedule work when the time comes. I would be much happier to have people who were committed and really wanted to participate rather than we will deal with the scheduling problem when the time comes. Ideally, I would like us to meet again in two weeks. And we will communicate by email and in the Google Doc in between.
Just as a reminder, no one should be under the delusion that participating in this Committee by any way gets you off the hook for eventually participating in the actual panel itself. And so, do a good job. Otherwise, the bylaws you will suffer under may be your own.
Jan?
>> Jan: Two questions: Can you clarify the level of access restrictions on the Indico, the Google Doc and all that have stuff?
>> Ian: At the moment the Indico -- the Google Doc is set wide open. And I'm happy -- if people would prefer that I invite individually people by email, I'm happy to do that. At the moment. Or I'm happy to close it and have people send -- ask for editing privileges. I thought for the purposes of today, I would leave it pretty open. I'm hoping that the kinds of discussions that we have are not -- they should not be -- they are discussions that could be had in public, I think. If we see that the Google Doc gets messed up, then we'll have to lock it down. But we'll see. At the moment the Indico is -- these slides were open on the Indico section. And it's -- I believe that that's a public-facing page, yeah. That's --
>> Jan: Okay. And then the second question is can we add Slack to the means of communications? I believe the Snowmass Slack is at least still nominally active. Maybe we can just add a channel there?
>> Ian: Sure, if we can figure out how to do that, that would be fine.
>> Joel: Under the Snowmass Slack I think there is a CPSC Slack channel that I think we used, remember that there was a smallish group that wrote the charge to you. And I think we used that. So, that's still available to us. If you see it, it will say something like CPSC or SPCA or whatever it is. I can try to send that out to you. And maybe we should just use that rather than create yet another one.
>> Jan: Thank you. I think that would be nice. Yeah, thanks.
>> Ian: And Giordon, you put the Google Doc into the chat, which is perfect. When I clicked on it, I ended up seeing a -- more than a number of -- 15 anonymous users. So, yes, they're putting their names. At this rate we'll be done by the end of the afternoon. This is perfect. Okay.
Giordon? Giordon is typing.
>> Giordon: So, I didn't have a question, I was just looking at the sections listed in the Google Doc.
>> Ian: Yes.
>> Giordon: What's not clear to me is the sort of discussions about the use of energy efficiency renewable technology, is that sort of stuff. What section does that fall under?
>> Ian: From my perspective -- it's -- this is an area that we can discuss. I was thinking that would be a technical working group. So, efficient -- so, efficiency in the same way that like that might be a place where different competing architectures might be discussed. Energy efficiency, green computing, et cetera, would be -- might be a dedicated technical working group of the -- of the group port. Because from my perspective, that's something that will -- that there's definitely a technical aspect of that. It's also -- there's a topical one where it's something that if -- as other kinds of technology evolutions come along, they would also need to be a framework for them to go. And I'm guessing the technical working groups are ones that will evolve over time. We need to devote a structure for how they are created and operate, but also how new ones are created and operated.
>> Giordon: Okay. Just a quick follow-up. How to handle things that fall into multiple groups. Because, for example, when we talk about efforts towards combating climate change, that's under the -- and under the technical working group.
>> Ian: Okay. I think in the case of the brainstorming part, we should put them in both places and tag them as things that we need to decide whether -- how -- is in an Element we should keep in a particular section or concentrate that. But if people feel there is an overlap, at this stage, we simply mark them in both spots. Okay? Matthew.
>> Matthew: I was just gonna make a small request. And I think it's great the Google Doc is currently wide open. But sometimes it is advantageous, especially when you're trying to work with additional people, if instead of just seeing anonymous floating around on screen, we can see who is editing what. And if you have more than two or three people, at least more me, that's hard to track. If it's also possible to invite us by our either university/institution emails or by our Gmails, I think that would be really convenient.
>> Ian: Both those are possible. One thing that I may try to do is I will try to invite people based on the emails that I have. And if that -- but if somehow I lock someone out, they should simply ask for editing privileges from the account they prefer to use and I will enable it. But it's a good idea. I will -- after the meeting I will lock this down and then as -- and re-enable it with email. And if I have blocked anyone out, I -- it was not intentional.
>> Matthew: All right. Great. Thanks.
>> Giordon: Sorry, one minor question.
>> Ian: Sure.: Giordon: What's the suggested number of -- I'm assuming you want us to pick one section to be a member of? But then maybe two sections to be auditor for? Or what's the sort of recommended number here?
>> Ian: I don't have a -- I don't have a strong recommendation. I think that -- I'm also -- from my standpoint, if someone has a strong -- feels strongly about more than one section and wants to contribute and they would like to be a member of more than one, they should do that. I think the problem -- we're not gonna -- it will not be a problem of too much enthusiasm. I think the problem is as the time wears on, convincing people to contribute text will be the harder part. I'm happy if people sign up for more than one thing. If they -- I hope at a minimum, people sign up for one member and one auditor. If they feel strongly about two, two members, if they feel strongly about one and want to contribute in two other places and want to be listed as auditor, they can do that too for more than one. Make sense? Great. Charles.
>> Charles: If we're going get someone from CPAD to tell us what worked for them and what didn't, it would be good to have that done as soon as possible. Maybe even start off the next meeting with that.
>> Ian: Yeah, my hope is that that is something that we could do at the next meeting. So, we will find -- what we want is someone who has been in that program for long enough to have seen it through from inception to operations and evolution. And so, let's -- we will work on that and see if they have an opportunity to give some feedback, some information at the next meeting. Okay? All right. Is there -- let's see... all right.
So, that brings us to the end of the hour. Are there other -- are there question about the process or the task at hand? Or does anyone want to run for the hills? Let me know.
>> Liz: I'm sorry, I can't find my hand. I have a comment that is gonna turn into a question.
>> Ian: Okay.
>> Liz: My comment is that the structure of the funding agencies, you know, where there is a research -- at least in DOE it's Glen and then there's another person who is doing operations. And then there -- but some projects kind of fall in the middle, you know? That they are -- fall in the cracks. For instance, joint force support. So, if this next panel that we're writing the bylaws for wants to propose that should be supported, some of the statements that you made seem to indicate that we -- that panel can't do that. So, what are your thoughts about that?
>> Ian: I will make some comments and then Joel will make some comments as well.
I think that we sort of have to recognize that this particular panel, that we are not blessed with any authority at all. So, we could have an opinion on what is something that should be done, but it is an opinion. And so, I think that what this committee can do and what the eventual panel can do is to like have reports. Have workshops. Have documents. Have suggestions in terms of what would be valuable to the community that would come from grassroots efforts in terms of establishing what was considered to be valuable. And we can hope that over the course of time that the relationship between the agencies developed in such a way that some of those things are taken into consideration.
But I think that that's the -- but I think that's sort of the level that we have which is that we can make suggestions, but that we can't -- that we don't actually get to make decisions. And Joel maybe you would like to comment?
>> Joel: Yeah, I can support everything that you said when the question came up I was gonna mention that there is a computing activity in DOE. And Jeremy Love is the person that deals with that. He's well aware of what's going on here. He's actually in this little first group that we had of four people, he actually talked to us. And he's very, very interested in just the topic that you mentioned and several others. So, I don't think that there's gonna be a real problem in getting the -- incidentally, he was at Snowmass and was well aware that this was coming. So, I think that the idea was to establish the value of this organization when it's all set up, and then I think the communications with the agencies will go -- will go relatively smoothly. We also incidentally interviewed Helmut Marsiske about how CPAD and the agencies interact. I'll actually try to find out if I can share those notes. I mean, the discussion was pretty frank and it was in a small group. So, whether he's willing to let the notes go out to a larger group, that would be an interesting -- I think we have to ask about that. But I think that the whole idea is that the future panel when it's set up has to kind of win the confidence of the agency as a source of wisdom and help and support. And then everything will go very smoothly, which I think is has with CPAD.
>> Ian: Peter.
>> Peter: So, just to point out, we went up in the unusual situation where DOE, DOE, DOE. I had a meeting with, Bogdan Mihaila, Jeremy's sort of counterpart at the NSF. He wasn't aware of this. So, somehow we wound up with the usual asymmetry.
>> Ian: May I comment on that. So, there was some kind of disconnect here. We made substantial efforts to communicate with him. Didn't answer our email. Checked that we were sending it to the right place. Talked to Jim, I don't think he ignored us. I think we just somehow talked to each -- tried to talk to each other through parallel channels. So, that was a shortcoming, but we had to decide whether to go ahead with the next steps. I'm very aware -- I think we should all be aware of NSF's importance in this [Joel]
>> G.J.: I talked to him yesterday, and I talk to him reasonably frequently for obvious reasons. I can bring it back there.
>> Joel: I suspect there's also some issues -- perhaps NSF was undergoing some reorganization. At this time know about it. And I'm a little bit worried that we got entangled in that somehow. So, I don't know. But there was no attempt to ignore him. And it was a shortcoming that really had more to do with time than anything else.
>> G.J.: And enough said, just make sure it's in the loop going forward.
>> Ian: Okay. Is there anything else for today? All right. If not, I look forward to working with all of you over the next few months. And I hope that we will come up with something that we -- is both useful and we are proud of. And we will tentatively schedule this meeting for this time two weeks from now. And we will be in touch through virtual communication and we'll try to get the Slack channel set up and try to get the Google Doc locked down a bit. And we will also just try to be -- I think people should feel free to have discussions about the various topics in -- as all of those forms and that we will have a meeting two weeks from now where we will concentrate on two things. CPAD and also where we are on our task. All right. And have a good afternoon.
>> Thank you, bye!
>> Thank you!
>> Bye, everybody!
>> Bye!