ESIP 2014 Summer Meeting – Recap and Resources

The 2014 ESIP Summer Meeting took place July 8-11 at the beautiful Copper Mountain Resort, located at an elevation of 9,700 ft. in Frisco, Colorado. The meeting, themed “Linking It Together: Sustainable Software Advancing Science Data and Services,” offered a multitude of activities for everyone in attendance. We had 300 people at the meeting, 36 more attended remotely, at least 5 co-located meetings (LTER, DataOne, HDF, OPeNDAP and Software Carpentry), 84 breakout sessions with well over 100 contributors and a jam session. Wow!

Information on all sessions, including recorded presentations, can be found at http://commons.esipfed.org/schedule/Summer%20Meeting%202014

Distinguished research scientists, undergraduate/graduate students, young professionals, ESIP Student Fellows and first time attendees alike basked in the sunshine and alpenglow, indulging in educational and recreational opportunities.

Educational:

• Keynote plenaries on software sustainability featuring speakers from data centers, science and entrepreneurs
• Breakout sessions on software metrics, attribution of software and source code and building community around a software package
• Half-day training on Agile software development practices and a discussion session on Agile in use around the ESIP Federation
• 2-day Software Carpentry Boot Camp which will teach researchers basic lab skills for scientific computing: the tools and techniques that will help them get more done in less time, and with less pain. Covers Unix Shell, Python or R, Git and Github and SQL.
• Poster Session
• FUNding Friday Ideas Jam
• FUNding Friday Proposal Pitches

Recreational:

• Dining in the Copper Mountain base area
• Taking a chairlift ride to the mid-mountain “Lift and Lunch” at Solitude Grill
• Hiking and Mountain Biking on the mountain or on local paved trails
• Dining in Frisco

Two special events took place at this year’s summer meeting.

ESIP Jam Session

[photo: https://twitter.com/junanaguy/status/486876868058955776/photo/1]

Organized by Jeff de La Beaujardiere, the 1^st Annual ESIP Jam Session took place at the Incline Bar & Grill in the Copper Mountain base area. The music flowed as smoothly as a mountain stream, with meanders and a few rapids thrown in. Music Jam Session audio files are here.

FUNding Friday

On Thursday night at the Incline Bar and Grill, myself along with other ESIP students and members shared good ideas and ultimately collaborated to propose an innovative science data idea using the power of a poster. ESIP provided all the poster supplies for the FUNding Friday Ideas Jam. Winning proposals are eligible for awards up to $5,000 (member proposals) and $3,000 (student proposals).

Then, on Friday morning, ESIP attendees had a chance to view the posters constructed Thursday night and after hearing from the presenters, vote on the projects they would like to see funded.  This year, we had 6 student proposals and 4 member proposals. We were all surprised and humbled when we were told after voting that ESIP would be funding all of the projects!

Winners will be funded to attend the ESIP Winter Meeting in Washington D.C., January 7-9, 2015 where they will present a poster showcasing their achievements toward their proposed project goals over the past six months. What an exciting opportunity for students to learn about proposal funding and project management!

A collection of pictures from the Summer Meeting can be found at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.732357430143869.1073741827.150015055044779&type=1

Additional information and discussion can be found on @ESIPFED’s Storify: 2014 ESIP Summer Meeting or by searching the hashtag #ESIPFed on Twitter

The next ESIP Meeting is the Winter Meeting in Washington D.C., January 6-8, 2015.