Tripal User's Meeting 2019/02/05

Meeting Date
Attendees

Stephen Ficklin, Sook Jung, Katheryn Buble, Shawna Spoor, WSU
Meg Staton, Abdullah Almsaeed, Bradford Condon, UTK
Lacey Sanderson, UofS
Ethy Cannon, ISU
Gerard Lazo, ARS, Albany, CA
Monica Poelchau, USDA-ARS-NAL
Sean Buehler, UConn
Nathan Weeks, ARS, Ames

This is an open agenda meeting.

 

  • Thank You

    • PAG Codefest Committee:  Stephen, Ethy, Meg

    • PAG Workshop:  Bradford, Valentin, Meg

  • Reminders

  • Open Topics

    • Email from Maria Martin, lead software development in UniProt at EMBL-EBI:

      • "I was wondering if representation and visualization of proteins is something of interest for Tripal. My team is developing web components for sharing visualizations amongst other activities."

      • Perhaps a topic at our March meeting.

      • Meg will follow up to see if she wants to present.

      • Something like tools on? http://pdb101.rcsb.org/

  • GitHub Issues

    • Below issues are tagged as “Discuss at next User’s meeting”.  We don’t need to go through them all necessarily.

 

  • Tripal Advisory Committee https://github.com/tripal/tripal/issues/786

    • Draft document here (thanks Meg) https://docs.google.com/document/d/12bgwGcoH_od6hyle-Aa4USrc-DS8cZ9bbJvfB3jQGyQ/edit  (See the section titled Science Advisory Committee towards the bottom)

    • Summary from Meg:

        • An additional layer of governance with members not on the PMC

        • PMC would be for steering the code

        • SAC would act in an advisory role only

          • provides leadership, guidance and coordination for Tripal

          • Should include extension developers, site developers, external topic experts

          • Thinking about Tripal from a broader perspective: overall priorities, direction, timelines, funding strategies, recruitment, data best practices, community support, etc.

      • Ethy: Two year membership should be easily renewed if the member is willing

        • Create a minimum of external and internal members

      • From Wikipedia: 8 members is a maximum

        • Also good to start small

      • Start with an internal board and work up to external members

        • Also it might be harder to get external members since they have less of a stake in Tripal

      • Primary meeting in January at PAG with teleconference option

        • Quarterly meeting during the developer call?

          • Allows more of a role by the community and allows the community to guide the SAC

      • Majority based voting since it is a recommendation

      • Posted publicly for transparency. Hopefully this doesn’t discourage ppl to discuss openly.

      • Emergency meetings can be called by the chair

      • Very important to pick the first chair!

      • Strongly encourage all SAC agenda items posted to the github issue queue!

      • Sook commented that it might be help to have multiple layers. In rosaceae there is a chair, vice chair and secretary. They move up in the ranks so only the secretary is voted on. The secretary takes notes and this provides a training model.

      • Ethy comments that perhaps the chair should delegate to ensure that ppl with the right personalities take on the various tasks.

        • Phrase the chair responsibilities as “they will ensure that”

      • Could send out a request for rejection to the mailing list and then set a timeline. Important to get this started

      • Add proposed members to the request

      • Chair should probably not be on the PMC

      • Chair should be someone who has been active in our User's meetings in the past.

      • Acting SAC:

        • Acting Chair Nominations: Ethy *, Acting Co-Chair Meg.  Until April 2nd.

        • PMC will talk about who to recommend to add to SAC

        • Duties:

          • Send out a request for objection about the current approach over general email list or issue queue.

          • Setup the internal stakeholder group

            • SAC Member: Send out a personal email directly to all the PIs or folks who lead the website development to ask who is interested.

            • Internal stakeholders should be a mixed group of PIs and lead site developers.  When sending out emails to PIs be clear that involvement could be the PI or their lead developer.

            • perhaps a GMOD person on the list.

          • Provide update at March Users Meeting.

 

 

 

 

  • Backdrop.  If time (i’d prioritize this over many of the github issues let's make sure we get to it BC): proposed plan for T4 and beyond.

    • Concern: small development team stretched too far

    • Concern: seem to be going in too many directions

    • Create an issue on GitHub for it.

Meeting Type
Users