OpenDreamKit

A project funded by the Horizon 2020

European Research Infrastructures Work Program

Steering committee meeting, minutes

Minutes for the meeting of the OpenDreamKit Steering Commitee on the 26th of January 2016

The meeting was held at the University of St Andrews, at the occasion of the WP6 meeting Knowledge representation in mathematical software and databases

Attendance

Were physically present:

Were able to participate remotely via hubl.in:

Neil Lawrence (NL: University of Sheffield), Wolfram Decker (WD: University of Kaiserslautern), Dima Pasechnik (DP, University of Oxford), Marcin Kostur (University of Silesia), and Florent Cayré (FC, Logilab) also attempted to participate; however the sound quality was too low for them to follow the live discussion.

We used a pad on framapad to edit collaboratively the minutes, and a chat on gitter for coordination and interactions with remote participants.

Partners not present were contacted during the day of the 26/01/2016 for their votes.

After the meeting it was discussed how to better organize future meetings to avoid the technical difficulties. See the recommendations for organizing official meetings in our instructions for participants.

Adoption of final Consortium Agreement (CA)

Supporting slides

BP announces that the CA is only missing the signature of the CNRS, and that this should be resolved soon (update on 04/02/2016: resolved).

BP presents the consortium agreement

Brief progress reports for all sites

Comments and discussions:

Zürich partner situation (PO Dehaye position at the University)

POD: My contract as Assistant Professor at the University of Zürich ends August 31st 2016. OpenDreamKit has 12(+1) person months planned specifically for my salary months 12-24 (so it starts exactly when my regular contract ends). Zürich is part of WP6, to lead one task ending early, and helping up to month 24. I am the only ODK participant in Zürich.

Potential problem: Zürich says they require PIs to be professors, and it may not be possible to nominally extend my Assistant Professorship even though the money is available, in which case they would not be able to host me between months 12 and 24.

MK: an option might be for Bremen to host POD. In which case the money would need to be transferred from UZH to JacobsUni. Of course this requires a negotiation between ODK, UZH, and Bremen.

After discussion and vote, the Steering Committee agreed on the following:

Expressed votes: JC, LDF, POD, SL, UM, VP, NT, MK, HF, CP, MA, FC; all positive.

Boards

Advisory Board

SL is in charge of setting up the advisory board.

Here is the preliminary list of potential members, initiated at the Kickoff and expanded upon since them. Participants are welcome to submit more names to the above list, and specify whom they would feel comfortable contacting.

SL will send information soon to all partners to coordinate the action, in particular for splitting the contacting work.

Quality review Board

The quality review board will review the way the deliverables have been produced; with the aim of identifying good practice and weaknesses, and to share the lessons with the project to improve any future project work. The board will focus on selected deliverables and investigate those in detail rather than attempting a superficial inspection of all deliverables.

According to HF, four members are already part of this board. A fifth member would be welcome but not necessary.

Deliverables submitted and next ones to come

See the status reports for the already submitted deliverables.

The slides contain deliverables due for June 2016.

UPSud asks to postpone “D3.2 Understand and document SageMathCloud backend code” to M18 due to the delay encountered in recruiting the engineers.

Data Management plan (DMP)

BP encouraged sites to complete the DMP with their own data information. They can find help by looking at what other partnes have written for their own data. For the first version of this DMP, only simple short information is required.

MK: for the long run, and as a project, OpenDreamKit should have a fundamental discussion on data. This includes in particular a definition of the Data / Knowledge / Software and their relations/unseparability in maths. The results of this discussion could be included as a preamble in one of the later data management plan documents.

The SC agrees that for the first version the information already available is fully sufficient. The fundamental discussion can be made for the second version of the DMP.

BP: short reminder (p.20) on publication recommendations.

TODO: copy the publication recommendation information to our main README.

Finance and administrative issues/questions from partners

BP announced that UPSud will be leading an intern financial evaluation at the mid-term of the 1st reporting period (around May 2016). This is planned in order to correct some possible mistakes before the official check.

Organization of meetings

MK suggested that the coordinator just take its favorite pick and be done with it. NT will do it after a brief poll.

Questions

<