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
  • visibility within collaboration
  • an understanding of what is contributed by members
  • credit should be awarded or acknowledged for service work which does not have high visibilty (plumbing). This work could include:
    • system testing, documentation, the work done on cuts per region, etc.
    • acknowledgement in published papers is one way to recognize such work
    • raising the profile of the job would also help
    • need someone to monitor service contributions
• 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.