[clas_term] Meeting discussion summary and a call for a new Student / PostDoc rep

[Daria Sokhan]

Hello everyone,

Here's a summary of today's meeting, where we had a turnout of 9 people. I
don't know how many of you are currently at JLab but this is pretty damn low
so it would have been good to see many more of you there, especially given
the importance of this meeting's discussion.

There is a proposal of changing the way calibrations are being carried out
-- to take the responsibility away from students and allocate it to
"experts" (self-volunteered, for a fixed term perhaps -- such as a year --
to carry out all calibrations for their system on all experiments, maintain
and be entrely responsible for the software), most likely members of staff
or long-term PostDocs. This was discussed and the unanimous concensus
reached that it would be best to:
1. Have experts who really know the software and are very familiar with
calibrations and best ways of doing them
2. Have students calibrate for their experiments
3. Ensure that experts are on-call for the students, train the students at
the start, check the results of the calibrations and, importantly, all
modifcations to the software before they're checked in to the repository.

Another proposal was to restructure the way Service Work is carried out --
to have a committee decide what is curently the most important service work
and which institutions / individuals are best placed to carry them out,
allocate the service work to those institutions and oversee its completion.
This was discussed at the meeting and the general feeling was that it would
be best to have a coordinator for each experiment who would delegate and
oversee the service work for that experiment, and a higher-up committee to
do the same for service work which is not experiment-specific.

I shall report the results of both of these discussions to the CLAS
Coordinating Committee (CCC) tomorrow lunchtime. If you weren't at the
meeting but have any comments / suggestions to add to the above, please
either drop me a line or find me around JLab!

And finally, I took over from Sucheta as Student / PostDoc representative to
the CCC a year ago and think that it is time to have a change of rep. There
is no fixed term attached to the position but I think that it is benefitial
to have a rotation of people with the dynamcs and new ideas that this will
bring. I would like the change-over to take place at the next collaboration
meting in Spring. The job is not demanding and you can make of it largely
what you want. It involves, at its minimum, being the go-to person for the
student / PostDoc community for any CLAS-related issues that people may
have, maintaining the CLAS Term Members Wiki, ensuring that new students on
CLAS have all the information they need and, importantly, make the
transition to CLAS Term Members, holding the lunchtime meeting three times a
year and reporting to the CCC afterwards. In real terms this comes to very
little time but of course a lot more can be made of it if so wished. And new
ideas is part of the reason for having a new person! It looks good on your
CV and counts for service work, too. If you'd like more info and / or if you
think you might be interested in taking over in Spring, get in touch!

Have a good rest of Collaboration Meeting if you're at JLab and a wonderful
Autumn!

Daria


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Daria Sokhan
Institut de Physique Nucleaire
Bat 100 - M055
Orsay 91406                              tel: +33 1 69 15 45 00
France                                      fax: +33 1 69 15 64 70
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