[WSSSPE] WSSSPE4

[Neil Chue Hong (SSI)]

I agree that there's still a purpose in holding WSSSPE meetings.

I like Sou-Cheng's ideas (my personal preference would be for demos to be
introduced with short 5 minute plenary slots, followed by a longer parallel
session where people can ask questions/interact if they want to).

I really like Michael's idea. I agree that a big issue with sustainability
is the funding, and perhaps by working together more, we can become better
at getting funding for the things we think collectively need it the most
rather than a more scatter-gun approach.

For those of us not in the US, can I make a plea for this to be located
somewhere which is no more than one hop from a major US entry-hub, so that
it's a two hop journey for international attendees?

I also think that there should be a little more focus on the "doing" part
of the meeting, where there's a selection of what the community thinks is
most important ahead of time - the "what's going to kill us first" style of
prioritisation - to enable participants to hit the ground running at the
meeting. This might reduce the number of participants, as not everyone
might be interested in the topic, but would ensure that we didn't spread
ourselves too thin. Perhaps we could use the prioritisations from WSSSPE3
as a starting point?

As for things we could do differently / in addition, two things come to
mind (triggered by Lorraine's comments):
- More case studies, including negative or even neutral ones. We should be
able to provide pointers to practices in use and how they turned out
- Create a list of evidence that will convince sceptics, and work together
to tick off that list one by one

For example:

- Employing a trained software engineer on a scientific software project
leads to long-term savings and increased related scientific output over
hiring more untrained postdocs / students

- If you have $10m this year to fund software in a specific area, when is
it better to:
a) Provide $10m to one project and ask all the others to merge with it or
die
b) Provide $2m to five projects to increase competition and innovation
c) Provide short-fat funding to enable significant new functionality or
refactoring
d) Provide long-thin funding to enable retention of skills and ensure
maintenance
e) etc. etc.

- Addressing fears over open-sourcing scientific software (we created a
list of fears [1]  as part of work on software development practice in the
ELIXIR European Life Sciences consortium, along with initial attempts to
address them, but it would be good to point to specific examples)


Best regards,
Neil

[1] This is a draft for information only, and shouldn't be seen as
finished:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C8sWr-r9RJBO-RZaDtgjmlHLHCyTHxsBrD6I12vknQs/edit#heading=h.bg6it3rwav23

On 17 February 2016 at 10:27, Manish Parashar <parashar at rutgers.edu> wrote:

> Hi Dan,
>
> Agree with most of the comments — I think a focused event on Fall is a
> good idea and co-locating it with another event makes sense. Something on
> the east coast (DC) would be great.
>
> Two aspects I would like to see in the workshop is the role of sustainable
> software in reproducibility, and approaches/best practices in
> credit/attribution for software.
>
> Regards
>
> Manish
>
> --
> ==========================================================================
> Manish Parashar Office: CoRE Bldg, Rm 628
> RDI2/OARC/Dept. of Computer Science Phone: (848) 445-5388
> Rutgers University Fax:     (732) 445-0537
> 110 Frelinghuysen Road Email: parashar at rutgers dot edu
> Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019 WWW: http://parashar.rutgers.edu
> ===========================================================================
>
> On Feb 16, 2016, at 11:19 AM, Daniel S. Katz <d.katz at ieee.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Please let me know your thoughts about a WSSSPE4 meeting, probably in the
> fall/autumn.
>
> What would you want such a meeting to accomplish, thinking of what we’ve
> done previously and what new topics might have come up.
>
> Where should such a meeting take place?
>
> Should we do this along with any other event?
>
> Thanks,
> Dan
>
> --
> Daniel S. Katz
> University of Chicago
> (773) 834-7186 (voice)
> (773) 834-6818 (fax)
> d.katz at ieee.org or dsk at uchicago.edu <dsk at ci.uchicago.edu>
> http://danielskatz.org
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Neil Chue Hong
Director, Software Sustainability Institute
EPCC, University of Edinburgh, JCMB, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, UK
Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5957
http://www.software.ac.uk/

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/neilchuehong
Twitter: http://twitter.com/npch
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8876-7606
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