2019-09-10 Board Meeting

Agenda

• Approve last week’s minutes
• Status on elections (new schedule, current nominations, social event, AOB)
• Status on travel awards
• Status on ResBaz
• Status on upcoming workshops:
  • Genomics (Fall)
  • Ecology (October)
  • Social sciences (TBD)
  • UCF (TBD)
  • ML/network analysis (Spring)

Attendees

Brian, Alethea, Gaurav, Hao, Elise, Simona, Plato, Ben

Notes

Elections

• 8 applicants
• Do we want to waive the criteria for outreach coordinator?
• Is the listserve the best way to reach out to people?
• Next year, forward to sponsoring departments
• Informatics-teaching does encompass people who have attended a list
• Mel Moreno (WEC), could be a good candidate: scientific support
• Could we have incentives for board members and/or a full time staff that helps, get it included in people’s job descriptions
  • How do we get people to sign up to lead workshops?
  • Foster community a bit more; social events
  • Announce elections after each workshop
• What if we do the social in a week or two?
  • Spread the word a bit earlier next year
  • Is Greg sending out announcements on grad student listserve? (elections weren’t announced on this listserve)
  • encourage people to attend the board meetings
  • Plan to organize a social to:
    • Meet the new board
    • lunch hour with pizza
    • turn it into a town hall
  • pushing it back twice looks bad, also a fairness issue; people who got it in put the time in
  • original was 7, had a tie, had 8, then lost 2
  • Not a big deal if we just go ahead and elect everyone that applied
  • In agreement: take all the applicants for the new board (have elections)
    • Next meeting: before board meeting on 9/24, have pizza, invite funders to the social, push board meeting earlier
    • set time at 12pm-1:30 lunch with meeting to follow
    • Elections close on the day of the social
    • Include mention of travel awards at the social
    • Advertise social through R-Ladies
      • Twitter and meetup
  • How many people instructed in the last year (about 20), if we have food for 30-40…have 42 instructors (alhtough there might be duplicates)
• Social in spring for a month before instructor training

Travel awards

• scored awards
• have enough for 3 awards ($1500)
• the call was for $500
• All agreed to award all three
• De-anonymized process worked well (double-blind)

Status on ResBaz

• It’s all organized
• Meet at 8am to set up

Status on upcoming workshops:

• genomics workshop:
  • need to get in contact with Carla and Taylor
  • Geraldine will touch base with them
• Workshop:
  • Ecology workshop
  • early next week: Brian and Elise will email to organize
• Machine learning:
  • feedback
  • developed all materials, was a lot of different people
  • wasn’t super well aligned
  • went well, people from USDA and Demitri are interested in doing it again
  • sort of uneven, some of the sessons went better than others, people need to coordinate lessons a bit better
  • next time: go through all the materials
    • go through lessons to make sure everyone uses the same datasets and same terminology
• Have three workshops TBD:
  • social sciences:
    • Has anyone reached out to Sasha - no one has yet
    • Was from community interest, demand from psychology
    • RSSIG: R social sciences interest group; Rafael Vaca, runs workshop every fall semester; should be starting in Oct.
      • does 8 weeks of workshop
      • goes onto network analysis etc.
      • Oct-Dec, registration details TBA
    • Gaurav will contact Sasha
  • machine learning:
    • Geraldine is interested in helping with this for the Spring
  • UCF: Carla brought it up, haven’t heard anything else for this; have Carla follow up with this

For next meeting:

• come up with a list of items for ToDo items for the next board
• have handover document pages for the different roles:
  • look over them, take people through these documents
• Next meeting on the 24th