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Committee call 2018 01 23
This is the first committee meeting for Open Astronomy.
André, Brett, Christoph, Juanlu, Brigitta, Erik, Stuart, David and Peter
Bold shows the ones who attended the call.
David gave an intro about how OpenAstronomy (0A) was born and what's been done over the last 4 years. OA was created in 2014 after GSoC team suggested in 2014 that Astropy and Sunpy applied together. In 2015 we were not accepted, but we did in 2016 and 2017. That has helped OA to get some money (min $500 to be used for a GSOC student travel). Under the name of OA the gang of Sheffield have organised two/three(?) OA workshops (an extended version of Software Carpentry aimed to astronomy). In parallel Python in Astronomy (PiA) conference was also being organised by people that has been involved in the organisation of OA (e.g., Stuart and Erik). Stuart proposed at the end of last year that we have a committee to oversee GSOC funds, provide guidance to the SOC of PiA and support other related activities.
Juanlu ask clarification of how GSoC works.
- Google chooses a number of organisations from the applications received (deadline today! we had put ours in!!)
- Organisations rank the students based on the application and the skills shown. Ask for a min/max number to Google
- Google may provide you a slots between that min and max number requested.
- Besides the money that the students get, the organisation receives $500 per slot and an extra $500 to be spent by the org to cover the travels to a conference of a student.
The money from past editions is distributed to each sub-org depending on the number of students they have. This is "easy" if they all have a bank account where to receive the money. If not the leftovers can be used for the organisations of events like PiA.
We went over the room to say what we would like to see that this committee does.
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David: OA should keep running GSOC, create a communication channel for other open source projects (list of projects contacted), and organise specialised workshops for training.
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Juanlu: Extend OA to engineers, beyond only scientists. Also, his first experience with a summer of code was with ESA's SOCIS last year. He would like to have students that stick after the project ends. OA could be a source of information about conference to attend.
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André: He would like to collaborate with projects in other programming languages beyond python (C++, R, Java, ...). He's also interested in promote opens source software in astronomy in Brazil and Latino America.
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Brett: Probably the most junior of the team! He's been a student and mentor on GSOC. He would like to find out how to promote the programme better for students. We need better advertising!! Many students can fit GSOC as a step towards a research project when they don't have funds.
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Christoph: Advertise GSOC early!! among astronomy students. OA could also workout on the support/organisation of meetings/workshops/conferences. OA could workout a common place for CI and distribution (similar to the condaforge channel) for the different members.
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Brigitta: OA committee should be like the braintrust in dotAstro but for PiA. There's a bit of inconsistency over the years and she would like to see how that OA would guide the PiA's SoC. (Cristoph suggest having 2 conferences). Additionally, Brigitta mentions we need more students that stick to the projects.
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Erik: He's been in the SoC of ~3 of the PiA, he says OA could oversee the SOC. He agrees we should keep working on GSOC, but he's not sure whether we should stretch to all the languages. Not everyone shares the same definition of open.
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Stuart: He would like a consistency over PiA, and this committee could provide that. OA should be the contact point for people doing similar stuff, by participating in GSOC we are getting that already. We need to recruit more students that will stick (unfortunately most of the students we get are CompSci and they usually don't stay). The committee will not do all, they should provide the people to do the stuff. For example, making sure there's a GSOC admin, SOC for PiA, discuss about the use of the funds.
Erik brought up that maybe Open Source is not what we want to promote, but maybe Open Development instead. Meaning that we want to help projects that does the development in the open world (including discussions, issues, testing,...) whereas open source could be understood as put the software online. He doesn't remember whether the term comes from, but Brigitta points us to a blog that mentions it
It's agreed that we don't want a list of requirements to form part of OA (as in the case of affiliated packages), but that by being part of this the open development philosophy will be infected to the other organisations as some resources could be provided.
Stuart proposes that the money obtained from GSOC should be shared among the participants orgs, the left overs (extra money that Google may provide + what cannot be given to the orgs) goes to OA to be used for PiA or similar activities. Christoph suggested that a deadline should be set for the sub-organisations to claim the money.
All agree, with the comments from Christoph that this should be mentioned on the website and Brigitta mentions that we need also to discuss to which student goes the $500 from last year.