Meeting Notes for 4 October

Present: Sudha, Senem, Mark, Tom, Joel, Adam, Shane, Ken

Drupal

• Senem has arranged so that Sudha can deploy directly to production for the D7 site. The two will Skype on Friday to work out details.
• Kevin will schedule a conversation with Marge and/or Mitch about how to coordinate and manage development requests between QuarkNet and Xeno Media. Until then, Sudha will continue to update the tasks list, currently kept as a Google Sheet.
• There have been multiple instances of users being unable to upload annual reports, including Mark. It may be a site issue that Xeno Media should look at, but for the moment they aren't able to. As a workaround, exporting to .pdf format works in some cases, and having Anne upload it seems to always work as a last resort.
• Sudha has added decorative graphics tiles to the tops of most pages, made the About QuarkNet page more compact, and put Ken's anchors in the Community Events calendar.

CMS

• Adam gave us an overview of his use of Jupyter Notebooks, currently running on MyBinder, which is not a commercial service and not scalable idefinitely. The Binder developers have been working on the backend to make it easier to set up independent servers, but it's not stable for a production server yet. Binder is only necessary to allow unauthenticated access to JNBs, though. JupyterHub can serve JNBs via browser, but it requires authentication. This is feasible to run from QuarkNet servers, and Joel will explore this option over the next couple of weeks.
• JNBs are highly flexible, but Adam has found that a larger number of smaller Notebooks tailored to specific problems - pulling a dataset and making a plot or two - seems to work best in practice. Ultimately, we'd like Notebook access integrated with e-Lab logins where users can alter and publish their own JNBs, similar to how posters work in the e-Labs now.
• Adam will send Joel contact info for Binder developers and links to his JNBs that use Cosmic data (both done as of this update)
• Joel, Ken and Marge drafted two paragraphs on our intended use of JNBs as a Level 4 to the Data Portfolio

LIGO

• Continuing the above discussion, Ken suggests that having Level-4 JNBs with LIGO interferometer data would be ideal for 2018 summer workshops. Tom submitted a link illustrating what LIGO has done with its public data using JNBs.
• The 2017 summer LIGO workshops had difficulties due to the state of the e-Lab. Joel will work on figuring out the nature of the problem and have updates by the end of the month.

Neutrinos

New MINERνA data is available on a Google Sheet; Shane and Ken will discuss with creators Mateus Carneiro and Rob Fine Thu 5 Oct.

e-Labs

Moving the e-Labs source code from SVN to Git is progressing well, but will probably be postponed so that Joel can work on fixing the LIGO e-Lab

• The current task is re-writing the deployment scripts
• Developers should help identify portions of the code base that can be dropped

Miscellaneous

• World Wide Data Day is Nov 14. Sudha will help Ken with the website for it.
• Beginning this Friday, Uta Bilow will visit for two weeks to collaborate with Ken on the International Masterclasses.

-- Main.JoelG - 2017-10-04

Comments