Summary Notes of the Thirteenth Meeting of the JACoW Board of Directors

May 8, 2016

Present: Ivan Andrian, Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz, Raphael Mueller, Todd Satogata, Volker RW Schaa
Absent: Yongbin Leng

1. Approval of previous meeting notes (Todd)

Approved without modification after clarification of link to previous meeting's minutes. Questions of financing of Adobe and Enfocus licenses were left open at the previous JBoD (see current agenda item 4).

Mobile App

There was a meeting earlier May 8 2016 on the Mobile App experience at IPAC16, attended by the JBoD with exception of Volker. Christine will bring this to the awareness of the IPAC CC, and request support for a JACoW initiative to coordinate within the IPAC series.

2. 2016 Team Meeting: status of bids and appointment for its planning/preparation (Chris)

A vote was held among the JACoW Team in February 2016 to determine the 2016 TM venue; this is due to be a North American TM according to our three-year rotation. The final vote distribution was TRIUMF (20), LNLS (14), ANL (6), Grand Rapids (1), East Lansing (1), so the 2016 TM will be held in Vancouver, hosted by TRIUMF. Jana Thompson is the local organizer.

A poll was then held among the JACoW Team in early March 2016 to determine dates for the TM. This converged on the dates of Nov 5-10; Fri Nov 11 is a national holiday in Canada (Remembrance Day) so TRIUMF will be closed that day. This implies that the developer's meeting is Sat Nov 5-Sun Nov 6, with the full Team Meeting being Mon Nov 7-Thu Nov 10.

Christine does not have sponsored travel funding for this TM as of yet. Volker and Raphael also have some concerns about their travel funding with an upcoming GSI reorganization. Doodle poll comments included that Maxim will be in Vancouver Nov 7-11 as an exhibitor at an international meeting on Radiation Processing. Ronny has also excluded attendance the week of Nov 7-11 due to an obligation to attend the CERN Finance Committee meeting on Nov 9.

Christine will approach Mark Boland regarding support for David Button's involvement in the TM organization. David is willing and interested to help organize the TM after his good experience with a working group at the 2015 TM.

BoD Membership / Elections at TM

Raphael will not stand for re-election at the 2016 TM; he needs at least one year off for control system obligations with FAIR. He has negotiated time to support ICALEPCS'17 and IPAC'17 (both European conferences), but that's about it for his availability. We will need BoD candidates for his spot and potentially Yongbin's. There was enthusiasm about the idea of supporting David, as he is in the Asian region, and represents ANSTO and IPAC'19.

3. Updates on status of Indico-SPMS project (Ivan)

Todd and Ivan met with Thomas regarding InDiCo on Apr 12. Ronny brought a request formally to CERN, resulting in the assignment of an associate position (part time) to the InDiCo-SPMS project for three years.

Thomas indicated that he would like an ordered list of priorities for the project by mid-May 2016 from JACoW.

There was some discussion of whether it would be beneficial to have an InDiCo developer as a participate or even team member at a JACoW conference. This would best be done with a workshop or small conference in Europe. ERL'17 at CERN in June 2017 is particularly appealing as a target workshop.

4. Adobe and Enfocus licenses, actions needed for next conference (Volker)

We plan to have support for some core JACoW licenses for PitStop and Acrobat; this support has traditionally come from annual IPAC revenue with agreement from the IPAC CC.

We have not investigated the cost of 5 licenses yet. Enfocus/PitStop stays at $1k/year at present. Do we go with an Acrobat yearly or permanent license? Are there permanent licenses available for Acrobat 11 or DC? Volker: Korea paid the IPAC invoice immediately this year, very efficiently! Chris has a legacy document with a history of payments.

There was brief checking of online Acrobat options. The US cost per license is $450+tax/year, or a total cost of approximately $2500/year. We should develop a plan to contact Adobe to find out the minimum volume requirement for a volume rebate.

5. AOB

Ivan wonders if there is continued interest in the JACoW Flickr account. The latest conferences have not used it. For free Flickr, we have 1 Tb of data, but we have grandfathered into unlimited space from previous subscription to Flickr pro. Ivan has previously paid for Flickr pro himself, but his plan is not to renew it when it comes due in Nov 2016. Existing photos will remain available. We have not uploaded IPAC'15 photos yet -- Ivan gave the password to the IPAC'15 photographer. Todd has copies of them and may upload them.

Ivan plans to step down as registration module developer from SPMS as he has no time to do further development, he has no access to the database tables, and there are few requests for new features or bug fixes. There are some known problems such as an inability to print all receipts, but these are not critical path. Some other bugs, such as a problem showing registered authors next to abstracts for HB'16 encountered by Todd and Juliana, have known workarounds. At present Ivan's recommendation to new conferences is to use an external registration system connected to SPMS, which seems to be working reasonably well.

Raphael is updating the current activities, including TM items from Ronny's report and updates from Charlie and David. The template release procedure action item should have a raised priority, as the most recent templates are apparently not terribly consistent (font inconsistencies, Times New Roman indicated in LaTeX, etc.). There was discussion of our internal processes to make templates self-consistent.

Volker noted that he is no longer being notified of new SPMS instances, perhaps because of changes in the roles in the central repository. Volker will contact Matt and investigate the central repository roles to resolve this.