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/307320309 

Participants:

  • Giuseppe La Rocca (GL), Gergely Sipos (GS) - EGI Foundation
  • Genevieve Romier (GR) - NGI_France
  • Joao Pina (JP) - NGI_IBERGRID
  • Luciano Gaido (LG) - NGI_IT

Apologies:

  • Hakan Bayındır (TUBITAK)

Updates from EGI

A.) EGI Conference 2020

  • The official indico page for the EGI Conference 2020 is: https://indico.egi.eu/event/5000   
  • The registration is now open!
  • PC members are currently reviewing the abstracts submitted to complete the agenda programme.
  • EGI is searching for volunteers for the different programme sessions. NGI members are also invited to contribute.

GS introduced the agenda programme focusing on the more relevant aspects for NGI members and the community engagement.

1.) EGI 101: Introduction to EGI

- During this session, a general overview about EGI Federation, technical support, services, etc. will be provided.

LG: Following the positive evaluation of the EGI-ACE project, it's worth to better position the EGI Conference 2020 in the EOSC landscape. It is very important to profit from this event to stress the role of EGI in EOSC and the regional projects.

ACTION (EGI): Add a new session "EGI for EOSC" in the programme

2.)  Technical and Clinic sessions

There are Technical (and Clinic) sessions focusing on the following four main areas: 

  • AAI, 
  • Compute, 
  • Data, and 
  • Analytics.

Each of these technical sessions are organized as follows:

  • Overview about the EGI services available to support scientific communities in the specific area 
  • Experiences from champion users of the EGI service. 

Each technical session will be complemented by a clinic session. In each of the clinic sessions new or already existing communities can raise questions or ask for support directly to the technical experts.

3.) The European vision for a European federated cloud

This session will highlight collaboration between industry and research on federated clouds. Experts from the European Commission will provide an overview of the European strategy, followed by presentations from GAIA-X, on federated cloud for industry, business and the public sector, and from EGI, on federated cloud for research.

LG reported the ongoing discussions from different EOSC WGs. Overall, there is a strong push to remove computing solutions from EOSC and consider data solutions only. We should profit from this session, where EC members are present, to provide them feedback and focus more on the main objectives of EGI-ACE to support the future evolution of EOSC.

4.) Global Open Science Workshop

During these sessions speakers from different regions will discuss how to reach the interoperability of the different infrastructures.

5.) How to measure the impact of user engagement?

This session will highlight the methodology used by EGI to measure the impact of user engagement. 

Tentative agenda:

  • Intro - why is measuring impact important 5’ (Gergely)
  • How is impact measured in EGI today 15’ (Giuseppe - Use of OpenAIRE; use of Ops portal; use of customer interviews; REST API from Customers’ services, Council interview)
  • Monitoring scientific output with OpenAIRE 15’ (OpenAIRE speaker, TBC)
  • NGI experience 15’ (NGI speaker)  → We are looking for an NGI speaker. Any volunteer?
  • Discussion - How we can improve? 20’ 

LG: reported the needed for experienced support centre the document produced in EOSC (WP2) https://www.eosc-hub.eu/news/new-briefing-paper-cross-border-services

B.) EGI Engagement, Support and Training Annual Plan

The Plan was presented during the last meeting in July (the link is available in the agenda page).

C.)  Interviewing the NGIs (Council delegates + NILs)

The EGI Executive Board (EB) has started to interview NGIs representatives to collect feedback and suggestions for improvements, discuss their priorities, national policies and technical topics such as the impact factor.

GR: Reported that scientific communities in France are invited to upload their publications in a central repository. This repository is already harvested by OpenAIRE. Even if the repo is quite old, there is a clear roadmap to continue to operate it.

LG: EOSCPillar (WP7) is conducting a survey to collect information about the available regional/national catalogue of services. The plan is to extend this catalogue to also include software and training contents.

D.) EGI Webinar Programme

The second round of the EGI Webinar Programme is online Promote and attend: https://www.egi.eu/webinars/ 

LG: Proposed to include in the programme a webinar for potential new communities interested to use EGI services.

Updated from NGIs

  • NGI_FRANCE:

    • Preparing a meeting for the HTC training even in Dec. (in France language) Looking for some technical solutions to run the event.

  • NGI_IBERGRID:

    • Involved in the C-SCALE project.

    • The NGI will profit from this project to support new communities interested in Copernicus data.

    • PT is now part of ESA.

    • Trying to reach new potential industrial partners.

  • NGI_IT:

    • There are changes in the national landscape. Most of the Italian actors are interested in EOSC but, apart from INFN, it's not clear for them the EGI role and contributions in the set-up of EOSC.

    • EGI has to strengthen its position in the EOSC landscape (e.g: promoting the solutions/technical support offered to support the EOSC scientific communities).

    •  

There are minutes attached to this event. Show them.
    • 10:00 11:00
      Updates from EGI 1h

      1.) EGI conference 2020 (goes virtual)
      - Status of the agenda, sessions and opportunities for NGIs

      2.) Status of the EGI Engagement, Support and Annual plan
      - Update from EGI.eu and contributions from NGIs

      3.) Interviewing the NGIs (Council delegates + NILs)

      4.) EGI Webinar Programme:
      - Status of the 2nd round of webinars

    • 11:00 11:25
      Updates from the NGIs - Short round table update meeting attendees 25m

      1.) Status/feedback/technical requirements from the scientific communities currently supported
      2.) Recent and upcoming events
      3.) Training needs and plans

    • 11:25 11:30
      AOB 5m