Epic-cc-membership-committee-l mailing list

["Steinberg, Peter" <steinberg AT bnl.gov>]

Dear all –

We will have our next meeting tomorrow, Thursday April 25 at 10 am (4pm CERN time).

 

https://indico.bnl.gov/event/23136/

 

The key goal here is to finalize our proposal for changes to the policy.  Besides a few inconsistent terms pointed out in the BNL comments, the primary issues we gleaned from the responses were:

 

1. 0.2 FTE is too high for many ePIC collaborators

2. People are concerned about the administrative load of the worksheet

 

The solution proposed last week is

1. Reduce 0.2 to 0.15 FTE.  This emerged from a rough calculation of a typical US faculty member with 50% research time, and commitments to 3(!) experiments.

2. Formalize an “exception” procedure, in which individuals with specific cases could request that the collaboration waive the 0.2 FTE requirement in favor of a lower value, proposed and justified by the individual and their group.

 

I am fine about both of these steps in the direction of weakening the requirement, but I am concerned about a few things

 

1. I had someone argue that there is no way to really demonstrate a fixed fraction of someone’s work week, and we should focus on tasks as opposed to time spent.  This is in line with the BNL comment about moving toward a “significant” contribution instead of a fixed fraction of time. 

 I personally worry that comparing tasks between individuals and groups will be even more difficult, and some groups will claim they performed tasks that they didn’t really do. 

 

2. If we have an exception procedure, we still don’t know how many people will take us up on it.  It remains a problem that we still don’t have reasonable feedback on the whole approach – only a few collaborators commented at all, and I would generally expect the ones who took the time to do so to be negative overall.

 

Anyway I will put together a proposal for the CC meeting talk on Friday that we can review tomorrow.  It will include a proposed timeline for a second draft circulation (which Pietro and I think will be necessary to get the feedback we need) and another for going out for a CC endorsement vote.

 

- Peter