| title | author | layout |
|---|---|---|
Coordinating an Activity Area |
Graeme Stewart |
default |
The HSF is extremely grateful to members of the community who take on the role of convener in our activity areas - thank you. Each group engages with a different subset of the developer and physics community and thus the exact pattern of activities that are organised can vary. It is delegated to the conveners to decide the way to organise so that it best serves the needs in HEP software and computing as required.
That said, organising semi-regular events is very important to keep up momentum in a topic and sometimes a series of related events might happen bunched together more tightly, e.g., looking at one specific topic from the point of view of several experiments.
HSF activity meetings in general should try to:
- be there to help encourage the exchange of ideas and techniques
- do not need to focus on "finished" items, but rather can be there to provide a community forum for unsolved problems
- should ensure there is plenty of time for discussion
- should take notes or minutes for important discussion points (attaching these to Indico is recommended)
Another route for a group is that instead of group specific meetings, organise contributors to the [HSF Seminar Series]({{ site.baseurl }}/meetings/hsf-seminars.html). These meetings have a regular cadence and would usually attract many people who are not particularly experts on the topic, so the subjects should be accessible to a general scientific audience.
One other focus that we encourage is to organise events together with other groups, e.g., a special session at a workshop, a joint meeting with a software development project, a cross-cutting topic that bridges more than one HSF activity (our groups are not intended to be silos). These meetings are excellent for bringing together people that might not normally talk or know each other. They might also fit into a seminar session.
In general, recording is appropriate for HSF meetings, which are there to foster discussion and collaboration, so we do recommend it. There are a lot of meetings and we have a worldwide community, so not everyone who is interested can join a meeting and recordings can help people to catch-up.
However, you need to make it very clear with the speakers and to participants that:
- The meeting is being recorded and will be made public;
- And where the video will be posted ([YouTube]({{ site.baseurl }}/organization/youtube.html), CDS, etc.);
- Note that it is strongly recommended not to add video files directly into Indico, instead post a link to CDS.
In any case, please also make sure that meetings are minuted in a concise way (it’s not always the case that people have the time to watch the 60 minute video and they need a shorter summary). Minutes can be posted directly onto Indico (easy) or to the [HSF website]({{ site.baseurl }}/howto-website.html) (via a PR).
We strongly encourage the use of common software in the HSF and opportunities for common development and sharing should be seized when they exist. The HSF exists as a GitHub organisation and is happy to host projects to help them grow. This can include things like common datasets used in development as well as actual code.
Our activity conveners should usually dedicate between 5% and 10% of their time to running the activity area. More than 10% is great, but we recognise that people are busy with many other tasks. Less than 5% and the activity area can fall into an inactive state. Conveners should meet at least once a month to plan. The HSF Steering Group is always happy to attend to give feedback and suggestions.
At least one of the activity conveners should attend the bi-weekly HSF Coordination Meetings and give a short update on the group's recent and forthcoming activities.
When the HSF organises workshops activity conveners can give input to the organising team. If there will be a session dedicated to matters of relevance to an activity area then conveners will be asked to co-organise it.