Federica (chair), Rachel, Markus Hundertmark, Nina Hernitschek, Alex Razim, Andjelka, Lovro Palaversa, Monelli, Tomislav Jurkic, Robert Szabo, Yiannis Tsapras, Dragana Ilic, Michael Coughlin
Currently planning for Thursday-Friday Oct 28 & 29, 2021, as this period of the year is extremely crowded and there is little flexibility. To enable as many people to join as possible the sessions will be held in late morning EDT.
The first day of the meeting will be dedicated to presentations from the teams who proposed software and the second day could then be dedicated to breakout sessions to discuss particular topics.
Michael suggested that teams could be invited to upload longer talks (or other supporting materials) in advance, to provide background. Fed liked this suggestion, but emphasized that this material should be considered to be optional, as attendees don't always have the opportunity to review the materials.
Fed asked whether these talks could be made public or proprietary? Rachel noted that restricting access to uploaded materials would require some effort on the part of the TVS web developer, but it can be done. She felt in-kind contributions should really be public but non-in-kind projects should not necessarily be forced to be open. Yiannis supported open-source development, but noted that many projects are at a very early stage and may evolve so it may be confusing to share information before the projects are better specified. Markus also noted that software interpreted from the Roadmap may not necessarily represent the original or current intent of the authors, also causing confusion.
Fed indicated that she expected the Roadmap reviewers to reach out to the original authors of the sections to verify, and explore whether tools exist or have been proposed to answer their needs. This would leave the authors the opportunity to present their own software ideas if they prefer, or allow the Task Force member to represents them.
Markus agreed that many of the software aspects described in the Roadmap are at a very early stage of specification, and they are likely to be updated. Some may be able to merge.
Yiannis emphasized that it would be valuable for this Task Force to cultivate a clearer idea of the specific projects we are going to develop, starting with discussions between teams with overlapping proposals. He emphasized this needs to happen soon for the in-kind teams to be able to write their required reports.
Robert agreed with Yiannis, and ask what the relationship is between in-kind contributions and brokers? He also noted that many sections in the Roadmap lack any description of software.
Rachel agreed on the value of grouping the software proposals by overlapping topic, and inviting other contributors where appropriate, e.g. broker teams for classification, to understand the current state of art.
Yiannis agreed with the idea of holding regular workshops for the software task force, to keep momentum going. He also asked about the many classification software packages under development, and the need to aggregate input from multiple sources, so modularity is important.