Engagement & NIL meeting

Europe/Amsterdam
Gergely Sipos (EGI.eu), Giuseppe La Rocca (EGI.eu)
Description

This is a teleconference for the NGI International Liaisons (NIL), national/regional user community support teams and other stakeholders who are involved in EGI's 'Engagement activity'. 

Background to the NIL activity:

The EGI Engagement activity reaches out to scientific communities, researchers, educators and innovators in academia and industry and supports them in tackling scientific challenges with the use of ICT services, solutions and consultancy from the EGI community. This complex task requires coordinated outreach, technical support, training, testing activities - by the distributed teams and skills that are available in EGI. The NGI International Liaisons are key enablers and contributors to this, by linking national initiatives and teams into the European EGI Engagement landscape. The NGI International Liaison role is described at https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/NGI_International_Liaison, alongside with resources and materials that can help the NILs be successful in community outreach, engagement, support. 

How to connect

Teleconference room:  https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/786891461 

Notes of NGI International Liaisons meeting

24/July/2020

Participants:

  • Giuseppe La Rocca - EGI Foundation
  • Genevieve Romier - NGI_France
  • Joao Pina - NGI_IBERGRID
  • Ivana Krenkova - NGI_CZ

Apologies:

  • Ian Collier,
  • Luciano Gaido, and
  • Emir Imamagic

 

Updates from EGI

1. EGI Engagement, Support and Training Annual Plan

An overview of the new annual plan (Issue: July 2020) has been presented to the NGIs members attended the call. The latest version of the annual plan is linked in the indico page.

ACTION (NGIs): Provide feedback and suggestion for improving the plan taking into consideration the different opportunities for collaboration (see below). 

During the meeting were presented the opportunities for collaboration for NGIs:

  1. Promote additional use cases from scientific projects, research infrastructures and research communities that can profit from the participation to the co-design workshop jointly organized during the EGI Conference 2020 in Amsterdam (early Nov.).

  2. Support COVID-19 initiatives.

  3. Join the EGI network of trainers for helping scientific communities to get the most out of training delivered by EGI.eu and the NGIs and give recognition to topical experts within EGI.

  4. Contribute with new training topics to the preparation of the 2nd. part of the EGI webinar series.

1. EGI Conference 2020

After lots of consideration we have decided to turn the EGI Conference 2020 into a virtual edition.

ACTION (EGI.eu): Update the programme agenda taking into consideration that, due to the new format and the limited interaction the scope, some sessions need to be revised, including the training activities.

During the meeting EGI.eu presented the call for piloting new use cases and NGIs were invited to contribute sharing the invitation to their national contacts who may profit from the event. A dedicated indico agenda for this workshop is already available: https://indico.egi.eu/event/5038/

EGI.eu has also invited NGIs members to take part in the set-up of the Board in charge to evaluate the received applications, and agreed on the selection criteria to invite use case to participate to the co-design workshop.

NGI_France, NGI_CZ and NGI_IBERGRID already expressed interest to join this Board.

ACTION (EGI.eu): Identify a timeline for the organization of the co-design workshop.

Timeline (tentative)

  • 09 July: Sent call for use cases
  • 10 Sept:  The evaluation Board is formed with members of the interested NGIs and EGI members
  • 30 Sept: Use case are selected
  • 01 Oct.: Service providers are invited to participate the workshop and provide support
  • 26 Oct.: Finalization of the agenda. Collecting slide-deck from the selected use cases

Selection criteria (tentative)

The use cases should meet the following criteria:

  • The application represents an international use case
  • It requires integration of multiple EGI services with community tools/apps/data
  • It is committed to publish or consume third-party research artefacts (e.g. publications, datasets, tools, workflows)
  • The technical integration can be realistically completed with the support from the applicant, and EGI partners

2. COVID-19

A call for COVID-19 research projects was opened by EGI.eu with OSG in March 2020. 

So far, a total of 6 applications were received so far. Only 2 (out of 6) reached active support until now: 

  • VINI – multi-drug multi-target docking service for COVID-19 (RBI, Croatia).
  • Animal genomics for a “One Health” perspective in the COVID-19 pandemic era (University of Bologna, Italy).

ACTION (EGI.eu): EGI.eu will involve NGIs for supporting new additional applications.

3. EGI network of trainers 

ACTION (NILs): NGI members are invited to provide feedback and contribute 

4. EGI Webinar series

ACTION (NILs):  NGI members have been invited to contribute with new specific topics to be included in the programme.

NGI_IBERGRID is interested to contribute with a webinar on AI/ML.
NGI_FRANCE and NGI_CZ will provide feedback.

 

Updated from NGIs

NGI_FRANCE

  • Preparing a meeting for HTC/HPC sites in Dec. (in France language)

NGI_IBERGRID

  • Involved in EOSC-Life / EOSC-Synergie projects
  • LIP is involved in EuroHPC project (starting in Sept. 2020)
  • Minister of Education is supporting the update of the national computing infrastructure in Portugal. NGI_IBERGRID is contributing allocating resources for supporting new user communities

NGI_CZ

  • Involved in EOSC-related projects (e.g.: EOSC-Synergie, EOSC-Life)
  • Supporting dissemination activities through running projects
  • Provided resources for supporting COVID-19 activities 
  • Organized a webinar for data repositories.

AoB

ACTION (EGI.eu): EGI.eu will sent periodic reports to notify NGI members about latest updates and important topics.

 

There are minutes attached to this event. Show them.