Minutes of the Steering Board Meeting, 11 July 2006

Present:

K. Amako, J. Apostolakis, M. Asai, G. Cosmo, G. Folger, V. Ivantchenko, J. Perl, M.G. Pia, S. Sadilov, T. Sasaki, D.H. Wright

Minutes of previous meeting

To be prepared soon.

Action Items

32.6: John will appoint someone to create a list of Geant4 journal
32.7: Creating a draft of the scientific goals of the collaboration: open
33.2: Category coordinators to include a publication plan in working group plans: open
34.2: Provide release coordinator with acknowledgements and information about data libraries used by Geant4: done, closed
34.7: Provide portal to physics lists recommendations: open
34.8: open
35.1: establish task force for investigating data issue: open
35.6: Adding a physics list chapter in Users Guides: open
35.7: closed
37.3: write a letter to providers of data libraries asking what form of acknowledgement should be given: open
37.4: request to H-P. Wellisch to remove geant4.com web page: sent, but no response so far - close item
38.1: Collect volunteers to edit paper on physics configurations: open
38.2: open
38.3: open
38.6: closed
38.7: Distribute a set of guidelines for those who wish to add to contribute to the new Geant4 web pages: will be done in one or two days - item closed
39.1: open
39.2: open
39.3: Dennis will distribute license text for NJOY program: item closed

Other Meetings

Oversight Board: minutes of the most recent meeting are now available

New chair of board: Petteri Nieminnen nominated, nominations still open
Next Geant4 review to occur in earlu 2007: topics are physics performance, usability
- Steering board should give feedback for dates - need a mandate from Oversight Board
New license endorsed by O.B.

Collaboartion Meeting and Workshop

J. Perl, M. Verderi and A. Heikinnen nominated for program committee. This committe met and posted minutes in Steering Board agenda
Two options for users sessions (one day):
- invited local speakers only
- open, expanded, user session - this one is preferred
One day on validation verification
Possible themes for meeting:
- validation/verification
- computing performance
- software quality
Propose the above structure to local organizers, then announce the date of the meeting. Deadline: July 20th

Geant4 Organization

Topics discussed so far at organizational meetings:

Communications
- Need to promote more intra-collaboration communication
  - Currently the annual workshop is the best means of communication - is one per year enough?
  - Are there concrete goals which should be part of the coming and future workshops?
  - The role of workshops:
    - encourage more information flow, such as work being done in various groups
    - encourage new participants
    - identify key work areas
    - push forward in these areas by getting people together
    - give exposure to newer/younger members
  - Validation in different fields should be made known
- What information should be communicated?
  - scientific activity
  - plans
  - results
  - long term or strategic goals of collaboration
- How to work with outside users and projects
- Cross-functional teams have been suggested for such things as documentation, validation, or temporary tasks that may arise. How would these work?
- Steering Board
  - Need timely, open sessions of steering board
  - Invite non-board members to attend as cases arise
  - Minutes should be posted in one week or less
  - voluntary open posting of text version of SB agenda to be replaced by open posting of SB minutes
  - improved audio is required for virtual meetings
Internal Organization
- Need for transparency
- Need agreed upon, understood goals
- Detailed discussion of this topic set aside for later
Credit for Developers
- Internal credit
- External credit
  - presentations at international conferences
    - How to decide who delivers Geant4-wide talks at conferences?
    - It was agreed that a group of experienced people be delegated to apportion talks according to circumstances, the number of talks the proposed speaker has given, and speakers' experience.
  - presentations at virtual conferences not enough to encourage younger members to participate
  - publication of papers
    - need to have publication management/promotion/writing support team to push papers through the publication process, insure planning and quality of papers, and target the appropriate journals
    - Need to encourage or require publications
    - check and compare to publication rules of large experiment collaborations
  - What defines a Geant4 paper?
    - The word Geant4 is in the title or a key part of the abstract, and the paper is written by a collaborator
    - Geant4 is a major part of the paper
  - it was agreed to form a publication and writing support team with a leader to have a steering board seat. This does not at this time include referreeing. Ask for volunteers based on their publication experience.

License

The license has been adopted. All but a few of the 24 copyright holders have responded. Many institutions have responded (all positive).
The failure to comply clause as currently written could be abused - re-write it so that license is not voided if there is non-compliance
All future contributions to Geant4 will be under the new license
After talking with CERN lawyer, the following points were made:
- There should be signed agreements for outside contributors
- On the download page there should be a "click to agree" button that must be hit before Geant4 code can be downloaded
- Geant4 could be either a work in collaboration or in joint ownership - it was decided that work in collaboration was preferred

AOB

The elastic bug should be announced on HyperNews. A tar file of fixes should be provided until a patch comes out.
A bug in QGSC physics list was discovered - meet to decide what to do about it.