🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Thibaud, Paul

Introduction

Status of the deliverables and milestones

D5.6 - Report on lessons learned and future prospects for adopting best practices (31/01)
→ Sophie gave feedback
→ Ana and Uwe accepted changes
→ Alun and Paul need to review the document

D1.09 Periodic Progress Report (28/02)
→ in progress

M9 Successful completion of final review (28/02)
→ in progress

Status quo per WP

WP1

WP1 is writing the final report. Sophie will finish the sustainability outcomes soon and upload them to Zenodo.

WP2

D2.9 has been submitted. WP2 is working on sustainability and preparing the webinars with Kat.

WP3

Carlo is collecting feedback for the KPI’s. An answer from DESY is still missing.

WP4

WP4 is organizing the VISA workshop next week. The registration closes tomorrow. No one from ILL has registered yet.

Majid thinks about going to the ICALEPS 2023 and presenting ExPaNDS.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list wp5@expands.eu.

WP5 is finishing the final deliverable and also is taking part in the sustainability discussions.

Oliver has made a video where the platform is presented.

Antoine has created some Github issues for the last open topics after the WP5 meeting.

WP6

There is a good average of announcements for the six webinars.

On the 28th February ExPaNDS will be presented in Washington, D.C. in front of the lightsources community. This global endeavour is the next level of sustainability.

Together with Max IV an infographic will be published. End of this week it will be send around for review.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2023

23/02-28/02	MoU workshop VISA	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
20/02	Webinar - Life Science	online
21/02	Webinar - Cultural Heritage Science	online
22/02	Webinar - Tomography	online
23/02	Webinar - Industry	online
21/03-23/03	RDA 20th Plenary Meeting	Gothenburg

Brian and Majid are attending the RDA plenary meeting in Gothenburg.

Paul reports about yesterday’s LEAPS WG3 meeting. A grant coming up is coming up for instrument tools. Where and how can instruments be made FAIRer? Alun sees difficulties because of the data policies. Paul would like to discuss this within LEAPS.

Another grant is coming up in the 01-02 about software quality. Uwe and Ian Bird are involved.In DAPHNE4NFDI is a lot of work going on regarding electronic notebooks

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Anton, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Thibaud, Paul

Introduction

Patrick reports that we need to submit the final report on the 3rd May. But we need to be available afterwards, because the report will come back for correction. The structure of the project report will be sent via e-mail.

Closing Event

Everybody agrees that the closing event was a successful meeting. A big advantage was to meet in person again.

Also the hybrid meeting quality has been improved.

Anton and Lisa were a bit disappointed that not more DAPHNE4NFDI people have been there.

Paul missed longer coffee breaks to deepen the discussions with the partners.

Status of the deliverables and milestones

D2.9 - Report on promotion of FAIR data within Photon and Neutron RIs (31/01)
→ in review
→PaNOSC is missing
→sustainability needs to be referred to

D5.6 - Report on lessons learned and future prospects for adopting best practices (31/01)
→ Ana will keep us informed
→ working with WP6
→Patrick thinks, this is very important, can be used for report

Status quo per WP

WP1

Juliane is starting to write the final report and collecting data for that.

For all: please keep in mind to spend your money for ExPaNDS in February!

WP2

WP2 will finish the deliverable this week. Furthermore the work on the sustainability template is going on.

WP3

No other activities than the final report are planned.

WP4

No other activities than the final report are planned. Picking up some work from the leaving people.

Including the work into the subgroups of LEAPS and OSCARS. A FAIR subgroup should be formed In LEAPS WG3 to have a forum, where people can talk about FAIR.

Majid will send a save-the-date email for the VISA meeting at SOLEIL, 23/02/ - 28/02/. The first two days will be a more general meeting about VISA, whereas the two last days will be a hands-on-meeting. Juliane will set up an Indico page.

The MoU should be open for all people. Even if they will not use VISA (e.g. PSI).

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list wp5@expands.eu.

Oliver and Ana are working on a new video for beamline scientist.

Antoine reports that the platform is working again. But there is still some work to do.

WP6

The Synchrotron Radiation News article about ExPaNDS is submitted. Four of the six webinars for the PaN community are set up.

WP6 will disseminate the output of the grant.

The key achievements of Max IV can be used for social media.

There is a great interest in imaging (Diamond) on the training platform.

On the AAAS in March there will be a talk with a few slides about ExPaNDS.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2023

23/01-28/01

MoU workshop VISA

Saint-Aubin (Soleil)

Brian reports that Heike is still waiting for the review of her DMP paper.

Nicolas was asking for the financial numbers at the PEB, which Juliane had sent him. Nicolas will now send the correct numbers to Juliane.

Financial departments really must submit financial numbers at the end of April latest!

Alun remarks that DAPHNE is only a German project, which can help only a bit for the sustainability of ExPaNDS. It must be made more international, Patrick thinks that it is good to have a national project at least and adds that Volker Beckmann (EOSC FRance) said that there are also initiatives in France. There should be initiatives for every country.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Carlo, Anton, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Thibaud, Paul

Introduction

Status of the deliverables and milestones

D2.9 - Report on promotion of FAIR data within Photon and Neutron RIs (31/01)
→ in progress, collecting workshops and conferences

D5.6 - Report on lessons learned and future prospects for adopting best practices (31/01)
→ in progress, collecting the work from the other work packages, adding sustainability work from Sophie

Status quo per WP

WP1

Juliane is planning the closing event and the collaboration board meeting.

WP2

WP2 is working on the deliverable. A final WP2 meeting is taking place on 19th January 2023.

WP3

WP3 is summarizing the KPI’s and preparing the session for the closing event.

WP4

WP4 is preparing the session for the closing event.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list wp5@expands.eu.

WP5 is preparing for closing event.

Antoine reports that Soleil is working on a workflow tool.

Uwe and Carlo about the PaN data portal as a main result of WP3. It has already been added to the training platform.

It should be published on the ExPaNDS and the PaNOSC website. Carlo and Uwe will talk to Andy.

WP6

D6.24 was released in December.

WP6 is planning six webinars with use cases from the PaN community.

Community consultation has taken place at Diamond about the challenges of fair, there was a lot of input from the community.

A delay explaining report is written.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
CW 20/2023	Final Review	online

Uwe is not coming to DESY for the closing event.

Paul is setting up the TCB.

🙋 Juliane, Abigail, Nicolas, Majid, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Thibaud, Andy, Paul

Introduction

Status of the deliverables and milestones

D2.6 - Self-evaluation Photon and Neutron RIs for FAIR data certification (30/11)
→ submitted

D2.8 - Active DMPs for Photon and Neutron RIs (30/11)
→ ready to submit

D1.14 - Financial report 3 (31/12)
Answers from PSI, UKRI, Elettra, EGI and Max IV are missing.

D4.5 Deployment of Analysis Services for EOSC within the EOSC-hub (31/12)
First part of the deliverable is already in review, two missing chapters will be written by Majid until tomorrow evening.

D6.07 - ExPaNDS representation material for relevant large international conferences (31/12)
Reviewers: Patrick, Isabelle
→ is going to review tomorrow

D6.25 - PaN communities use cases (31/12)
Reviewers: Patrick, Juliane
→ is going to review tomorrow

Closing event

It is difficult to find a place for the conference, because many hotels are not available. The time table and speakers will be discussed in the organising committee meeting.

News from PaNOSC

There are two more deliverables to go and the final report to be finished on the 10th January.

INFRA-EOSC-01-01 is going ahead, the WP structure is fixed.

There will be a meeting with the clusters from 01-02 (software development) and also with Open Aire for 01-03.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Closing event is being planned.

The project review will be on the 15th, 16th or 17th of May 2023.

WP2

For D2.9 an outline is ready. Brian would like to discuss some of it with other ExPaNDS members next month.

WP4

Focussing on D4.5.

WP5

WP5 has worked on the PaNET ontology with PSI (training portal).

There are eleven workflows inside the PaN training portal.

Andy reports that there will be a workshop of LEAPS-INNOV WP7. Nicolas is also involved.

WP6

For the WP3 workshop more than 110 questionnaire responses were obtained.

Heritage science communities have portals for their work and they try to find out how to incorporate data in these portals to make it FAIR.

800 people have registered for an early career meeting. They were asked about ideas for a DMP. This is useful for our sustainability.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
CW 20/2023	Final Review	online

🙋 Juliane, Carlo, Majid, Antoine, Thibaud, Paul

Introduction

Status of the deliverables and milestones

D2.6 - Self-evaluation Photon and Neutron RIs for FAIR data certification (30/11)
The review is done
“D2.6 - we are evaluating internal review comments which are requesting a significant change.
We are still considering how to best respond to comments. Unfortunately, this will almost certainly require a short consultation with contributors and lead to a delay.” (Brian, Email)

D2.8 - Active DMPs for Photon and Neutron RIs (30/11)
The review is done.
“D2.8 - we have review comments, but Heike is focussed on a paper deadline on 15th December. We would then expect it to be finished as soon as practical after that.” (Brian, Email)

D1.14 - Financial report 3 (31/12)
An email has been sent to the beneficiaries. Answers are expected until the 20th December.

D4.5 Deployment of Analysis Services for EOSC within the EOSC-hub (31/12)
Silvan is leading this deliverable. The aim is to finish it for internal review by end of this week. The review should be finished by the end of next week.

D6.07 - ExPaNDS representation material for relevant large international conferences (31/12)
WP6 is checking if there could be a boost at the AAAS. Reviewers have to be found.

D6.25 - PaN communities use cases (31/12)
Thibaud is working on several use cases for the deliverable. Reviewers have to be found.

M11 - Production of final FAIR data framework (31/12)
Brian reports via email that the milestone was related to D2.7.

M8 - Third all-hands meeting organised (31/12)
The third and last all-hands meeting is being organised at the moment. It will take place as our final meeting in January.

M15 - Analysis services for EOSC (31/12)
M15 is related to D4.5.

M24 - AAAS & ESOF attendance (31/12)
Isabelle attended the ESOF 2022, the attendance of AAAS is being discussed.

News from PaNOSC

Juliane reports:
Patrick, Brian, Isabelle, Majid, Nicolas, Kat and Juliane attended the PaNOSC Final Event in Grenoble onsite.
Every work package presented their results and every facility talked about what PaNOSC changed for them. The project has officially ended, the report is going to be finished in the middle of January.

Majid reports:
A kick off for the MoU writing for VISA and the environment also took place in Grenoble. The collaboration is agreed and ongoing. General rules should be defined. A next meeting will take place on 18th January 2023. Furthermore it will be discussed at the final meeting in Hamburg.
Majid will send the MoU to Alun and Carlo.

Paul reports:
Andrea Manzi is in contact with EOSC future for using tags in the marketplace. It would be good to do this through LEAPS. Paul will talk to Andy. An initial set for the services should be built up, keywords must be chosen.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie has opened an issue for the sustainability onepager. Please have a look and fill in, where you have input.

WP6 has set up an organising committee for the final event, now the planning is going on and WP1 and WP6 are meeting regularly.

The project review will be between the 14th April and the 17th May. Juliane will send a doodle for three dates to suggest to the PO.

WP2

“However, I did want to update the PEB on the FAIR Task Force. We had our final meeting yesterday, so that task force has now closed (several of the other projects involved have already finished by now anyway.) Jos (EOSC-Pillar) has confirmed that there is no official final reporting requirement for the task force (so there won’t be a final report.) Obviously, we still need to show that we collaborated, so that collaboration effort will need to be mentioned in Sophie’s final technical report for ExPaNDS.” (Email, Abigail)

WP3

Carlo is trying to hit the KPI targets. He will ask the other facilities about the ongoing use of the PaN search API.

WP4

Nothing to report. (D4.5 see above.)

WP5

Marta and Antoine have finished the last workflow. All workflows can be found on the training platform.

The work for the next deliverable is ongoing.

WP6

WP1/WP6 have catch ups for the final event. The deliverables are ongoing.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Nicolas, Anton, Majid, Ana, Thibaud, Andy, Paul

Introduction

Status of the deliverables and milestones

D2.6 - Self-evaluation Photon and Neutron RIs for FAIR data certification (30/11)
→ The review is done
→ Abigail and Simon are working on the final version

D4.5 Deployment of Analysis Services for EOSC within the EOSC-hub (31/12)
→ Silvan is leading this deliverable
→ there is no EOSC-hub anymore, therefore we would like to transfer it into the horizontal infrastructure
→ there are some problems with finding our workflows in the EOSC marketplace, Andrea Manzi is talking to Cyfronet, who is responsible for the marketplace
→ Majid is writing the introduction, he would also like to mention the SLA, but this must not be in shape for this deliverable
→ Majid asks Paul if we now have the PaN button in the EOSC marketplace, Paul answers that it is not possible yet, but he doesn’t know where the problem is
→ we need a harmonisation with other EOSC projects, we decided to mention the collaboration with EOSC future, ELIXIR, EGI ACE and PaNOSC (VISA)
→ Majid is also citing his battery project as a collaboration
→ ALBA: VISA with Kubernetes without open stack
→ also DAPHNE must be mentioned
→ most important thing is: use cases in the portal

News from PaNOSC

The amendment was granted.

73 participants have registered onsite and around 50 online for the final event. The PO is unfortunately not coming. Not many people from ExPaNDS are coming.

Tomorrow Andy and Sophie are going to Brussels to discuss the INFRA-EOSC-01-01.

Heike is writing a paper about DMPs for the CODATA Data Science journal special issue on DMPs. A 2nd paper is being written by Marjolaine and Fredrik on the deployment of DMPs at ESRF + ESS.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie has made some progress on the sustainability papers.

At the final event in January there will be a final CB and a TCB meeting.

Patrick and Juliane have been to the EOSC symposium in Prague. Oliver has held a presentation about our training catalogue.
Furthermore the project Skills4EOSC was presented, with which we should connect. It is about creating a training ecosystem for open and FAIR science. Juliane will contact the coordinator of this project.

WP2

Nicolas and Majid have contributed to D2.8. Heike has sent it for review to Oliver and Steve.

WP3

Carlo email:
“I think we can close this issue. Details are in the issue.

• Paul and I will have a meeting likely next week to see where DESY can contribute and make us reach the target KPIs
• I am still waiting for any ExPaNDS facility to provide their search API or OAIPMH URLs, whenever they answered positively whether they have or not such services.

”

Majid asks when the deadline is. SOLEIL has problems with the endpoints. They have Scicat but they don’t have a real production-ready infrastructure. Patrick answers that this should be okay, because they can prove that it is technically done.

WP4

WP4 is bringing the last pieces of work into shape.

Silvan and some others are working on D4.5. The meetings are every friday at 10:00.

Majid reports about a joint WP4 event with PaNOSC, which should have a follow up at our final event. He asks Andy if someone from PaNOSC can attend the ExPaNDS final event for this topic. Andy suggests Jean-Luc and Erwan.

WP5

WP5 is focussing on making latest developments and “cleaning” the platform and uploading the platform into the EOSC portal.

Oliver and Antoine are working on the sustainability paper from Sophie.

Oliver is helping in D4.5 . He attended all the meetings. He is primarily working on TELBE. He will also provide a PaN training section with screenshots and text including the other WP4 datasets/workflows.

Uwe is exploring the possibility of organizing an event at HZDR for beamline scientists.

WP6

Kat will send a doodle poll for the organising committee of the final event.

As soon as the download from Zoom is available, Kat will download the recorded WP3 joint session.

Thibaud reports about a questionnaire, which Isabelle has sent to the ambassadors. WP6 has already gotten some feedback. The questionnaire consists of two parts. The first part is about demographic figures, the second is about practices and policies. WP6 will send the questionnaire to each facility of ExPaNDS and then can be sent to the ambassadors, funders, stakeholders, scientists and users. We can reach out to 10.000 people. There will be an analysis tool for evaluating. The questionnaire takes 25 minutes. It can be saved in between.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2022

29/11-30/11

PaNOSC Final Event

Grenoble

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Juliane, Brian, Nicolas, Alun, Majid, Ana, Kat, Paul

Introduction

Patrick welcomes everybody.

Sustainability

Andy, Sophie and Juliane met to discuss one-pager for LEAPS and LENS about each outcome of PaNOSC and ExPaNDS. Sophie already prepared a very detailed document. This is the continuation of the survey that Andy did with each facility and shows the exploitability of our outcomes. WP1 will provide a rough overview of the one-pager and will ask the responsible persons for each outcome to fill in this one-pagers. A first version should be presented at the PaNOSC final event in Grenoble.

Andy, Sophie and Juliane named some responsible persons in the document, but everybody should feel free to contribute.

We will collect everything in one document and afterwards create one sheet per outcome.

We need synchronisation between the facilities and be clear what work in progress means. This is especially important for the senior level engagement.

Status of deliverables and milestones

D2.6 - Self-evaluation Photon and Neutron RIs for FAIR data certification (30/11)

→ ongoing at UKRI (Abigail and Simon)

→ got feedback from Marta

→ Patrick is reviewing at the moment

D2.8 - Active DMPs for Photon and Neutron RIs (30/11)

→ ongoing at HZB (Heike)

M11 Production of final FAIR data framework (30/11)

→ correlates with D2.6

News from PaNOSC

Andy sends his apologies and he invites us to the PaNOSC final event. It would be nice to have at least one person from each facility.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Paul, Patrick and Juliane have met with Silvan to talk about the last deliverable of WP4 (D4.5), which is about the Deployment of Analysis Services for EOSC within the EOSC. Silvan will invite the responsible persons for regular meetings. Patrick asks Majid to help Silvan with the deliverable, especially with the table of contents.

A meeting with WP6 took place where the final event was discussed: 23 and 24 January. Kat will send a save-the-date reminder. There will be a small session with DAPHNE during our internal meeting and also a bigger session within the ExPaNDS workshop on Tuesday morning.

Patrick and Juliane are going to the EOSC symposium next week.

WP2

Brian is reporting about a paper that Heike (together with Andy Gotz) is writing for the CODATA Data Science Journal about the data management in ExPaNDS and PaNOSC.

WP3

Alun thanks the colleagues from SOLEIL for the hosting of the

WP3 Joint meeting. The meeting was very good and ensured the level of sustainability. 20 people were attending onsite and 25 people were attending online.

Kat will upload the recording on our website.

WP4

The most important task is the last deliverable D4.5.

Majid is writing a MOU for a collaboration with PaNOSC and ExPaNDS. There will be a joint WP4 meeting in Grenoble. He is writing a document on how to proceed with VISA. Patrick is phrasing the text with ILL.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

A poster was presented at the plenary assembly of LEAPS.

Oliver Knodel is participating and holding a presenting at the EOSC symposium.

Ana thanks Diamond for their help with the WP3 joint event at SOLEIL.

There will be no other public meeting with WP3 and WP4.

Sophie has reminded Ana and Oliver via email about the issue #18. That could be the content of D5.6.

WP6

Kat thanks SOLEIL for hosting the WP3 joint event.

There are some deliverables that WP6 is working on which have to be submitted end of December.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2022

14/11-17/11	EOSC Symposium	Prague
29/11-30/11	PaNOSC Final Event	Grenoble

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)

Patrick informs everyone about the INFRA-EOSC-01-01. DESY is representing ExPaNDS (Paul and Sophie) and Andy is representing PaNOSC.

All ExPaNDS facilities are needed to apply for the open call. It would be the best to talk to Paul and Sophie now, so they can write specific issues already in the proposals. The earlier they know, the better.

Kat is reporting that Diamond would like to be involved, but everyone has to wait for the political decisions. But at least they can be an observer. Brian agrees.

Juliane is still searching for representatives from ExPaNDS facilities to take part in the panel discussion during the PaNOSC final event about INFRA-EOSC-01-01. Majid would like to attend.

🙋 Sophie, Juliane, Abigail, Alun, Anton, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Paul

Introduction

Juliane welcomes everyone and especially Sophie, who is back. Everyone welcomes Sophie.

The 3rd PaN symposium was very successful. Kat will provide the presentations. The ICRI had a huge amount of side events and it was not possible to attend all presentations. It was a good networking opportunity.

News from PaNOSC

EMail from Andy:

News from PaNOSC is the closing event on the 29+30 November. All ExPaNDS members are warmly invited to join us in Grenoble to celebrate or remotely (less fun). Please register here:

https://indico.esrf.fr/event/66/

The PaNOSC+ExPaNDS 3rd symposium held at ICRI last week was well appreciated - thanks to all those who helped with the organisation.

PaNOSC is attending the panel discussion of the ESCAPE closing event tomorrow.

Any questions to be sent to me.

PAtrick and Juliane are attending the final event of PaNOSC. Maybe Kat and Isabelle are attending too.

Deliverables and milestones

Nothing to report.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Juliane and Sophie are working on the sustainability papers for LEAPS and LENS together with Andy and Ornela from PaNOSC.

The final event will be planned together with WP6. At the moment the rough agenda is:

23/10 PM ExPaNDS internal meeting

24/10 AM ExPaNDS Users’ meeting (open for all)

24/10 PM ExPaNDS internal meeting

DAPHNE4NFDI suggested a satellite event together with ExPaNDS. It was discussed if a half day is needed or the meetings can be included in the planned meetings. The majority would like to include one workshop into the internal ExPaNDS part to discuss the sustainability of ExPaNDS and future work. The ExPaNDS User’s meeting could be organised together with DAPHNE. Anton will discuss this topic in the DAPHNE EB.

WP2

D2.6 is going to be sent to Patrick and Marta for the review on Friday.

D2.8 will be ready next week. Oliver Knodel and Steve Collins will reviewing the document.

For D2.9, which will be written by Abigail and Brian, Abigail remarks that end of January is not a good time for a deliverable because of the holidays in between and asks if we can extend the deadline to midst of February. Juliane thinks that submitting at the end of January would be the best, but two weeks after will not be bad. Juliane will talk to Patrick about this topic.

WP3

WP3 is getting ready for the joint event with PaNOSC next week. There are approximately 20 people registered.

Carlo is working on #13, which is about onboarding our ontologies as an EOSC service.

The KPIs are monitored regularly. Alun asks DESY to work on the facility data catalogues to enable FAIR services and also on the PaN catalogue search endpoint.

WP4

Anton reports that people are drifting away at the end of the project. Furthermore he reminds people to work on the KPIs and the deliverables.

Paul reports about the ELIXIR platform. He heard about it in EOSC future. It is more about biological science, but we should keep it in mind for the review.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

The last deliverable D5.6 seems to be a bit tricky. WP5 is not sure about the content.

Clara is coordinating the organisation of the PaNOSC + ExPANDS WP3 joint event. An open session will be organised on the second day.

Antoine searched for google metadata tags and tried to do the event search for google. It is only available in a few countries.

WP6

Thibaud is going to attend the WP3 joint event at SOLEIL. Kat offers remote help.

Furthermore WP6 organises time slots for catch ups with every work package. It is difficult to find time slots with WP4. Anton should contact Thibaud for a meeting.

WP6 will discuss the last senior engagement video and a final close out video with WP1 in the next catch up.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2022

02/11-03/11	PaNOSC/ExPaNDS joint WP3 workshop	Saint Aubain (SOLEIL)
14/11-17/11	EOSC Symposium	Prague

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)

🙋 Juliane, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Carlo, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Thibaud, Andy

Introduction

Deliverables and milestones

2.6 - Self-evaluation Photon and Neutron RIs for FAIR data certification (30/11)

→ ongoing at UKRI (Abigail and Simon)

2.8 - Active DMPs for Photon and Neutron RIs (30/11)

→ ongoing at HZB (Heike)

1.14 - Financial report 3 (31/12)

→ starting in November at DESY (Juliane)

4.5 - Deployment of Analysis Services for EOSC within the EOSC-hub (31/12)

→ DESY (Anton)

→ EOSC-hub does not exist anymore, perhaps FedCloud instead

6.07 - ExPaNDS representation material for relevant large international conferences (31/12)

→ ongoing at Diamond (Isabelle, Thibaud)

6.25 - PaN communities use cases (31/12)

→ ongoing at Diamond (Isabelle, Thibaud)

→ WP6 needs to talk to Anton about the use case

11 - Production of final FAIR data framework (30/11)

→ refer to D2.7

→ UKRI

8 - Third all-hands meeting organised (31/12)

→ Final meeting in January at DESY (Juliane)

15 - Analysis services for EOSC (31/12)

→ refer to D4.5

→ DESY (Anton)

24 - AAAS & ESOF attendance (31/12)

→ Diamond

→ Thibaud will talk to Kat about this milestone (and the ones before)

Status quo per WP

WP1

Juliane started collecting all missing topics for the end of the project, including recommendations, tasks, objectives, KPIs.

The presentation website must be filled. Please have a look and send missing presentations to Juliane.

Juliane has contacted Ornela, the leader of the sustainability work package of PaNOSC and Andy to adjust the sustainability of both projects and the open tasks. A one-page document for LEAPS and LENS readiness to adopt our services is needed. Andy wants to talk about it in the LEAPS plenary, where Ana and Majid are attending. Juliane will write an email with some bullet points about this topic.

WP2

D2.8 is ongoing and Majid reports about writing meetings with Heike, which is a good idea.

Abigail and Simon continue writing the text for D2.6.

Reviewers for both deliverables have to be found.

Questions and remarks of the mid-term review will be adapted in D2.9. A planning meeting with WP6 is needed.

WP3

Paul, Antoine and Carlo discussed the PaN search API via email.

Only ten people have registered for the WP3 joint meeting between ExPaNDS and PaNOSC at SOLEIL. Majid will keep the registration open. Unfortunately Alejandra, Brian, Darren cannot attend. Also ALBA and ILL cannot attend.

Juliane asks who will care about the sustainability of the federated search API. Carlos answers that PaNOSC will do, but this topic will also be discussed at the joint event.

WP4

Majid asked EGI for D4.5 for a way to have an entry point to the platform. Paul suggested the entry point “infrastructures” and use it for all services. Furthermore keywords like “PaN facilities” or “PaN infrastructure” can be used. EGI is willing to work on this entry point. It would be an icon on the EOSC platform.

Furthermore WP4 is preparing a document for all facilities who are interested in VISA and the continuation of the collaboration.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

EOSC Symposium Prague -Talk accepted. Oliver Knodel will make the presentation

LEAPS Plenary 2022 - Poster accepted. Ana and Uwe will attend the meeting

SOLEIL Users’ Meeting 2023

- round table about data, data services, training … Ana is one of the panellists. A poster will be also submitted

Organisation of the WS during the meeting at DESY will be launched beginning of November

PaNOSC/ExPaNDS joint WP3 workshop organisation is ongoing.

Antoine is planning the last workflow with Zdenek.

Several materials were added to the training platform (e.g. the VISA workshop materials, PaNOSC/ExPaNDS joint WP3 workshop announcement …).

WP6

Thibaud asks if our final event is taking place in Hamburg. Juliane confirms and suggests to start planning (WP1/WP6).

Thibaud reports that the VISA workshop presentations were uploaded to Zenodo.

There are 60 attendees registered for the ICRI.

Thibaud will be at Soleil for the WP3 joint workshop.

All upcoming deliverables are on their way.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2022

18/10	3rd PaN EOSC Symposium @ICRI2022	Brno and online
02/11-03/11	PaNOSC/ExPaNDS joint WP3 workshop	Saint Aubain (SOLEIL)
14/11-17/11	EOSC Symposium	Prague

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)

Majid reports that Heike attended the DIGITAL LEAPS STARS project. A first face to face meeting took place and they are going to publish a survey for scientists. PaNOSC and ExPaNDS are the starting point for metadata examples, which will be a reference document.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Carlo, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Thibaud, Andy, Paul

Introduction

Nesw from PaNOSC

Andy has held a presentation at the NOBUGS conference. It was recorded. The feedback was good. People now know what we did and he got a lot of positive comments. He talked about the better carbon footprint for archiving the data than of doing a one week experiment.

The decision about the final meeting of PaNOSC will be tomorrow during the PMC.

EOSC-INFRA-01-01:

There was a first meeting with all EOSC clusters. They already have a name and logo for the project. The LEAPS general assembly shows interest in the grant.

Two facilities should lead the grant. There are four facilities , which are interested: ESS, ILL, ESRF and DESY.

SOLEIL and HZDR are also interested. Ana is going to ask internally, if they also apply. HZDR will only apply for the open calls.

Patrick and Andy will have a meeting in the afternoon to discuss how to proceed.

The general assembly is the decision making body.

Abigail asks if the UK partners can also take part. The EU has not made a decision yet.

The optimum would be one photon and one neutron partner.

Status of the deliverables and milestones

M17 Training websites and e-platforms online available (31/10/2022):

submitted

To do items

12/04/2022	Discuss with Brian if he needs PMs	Patrick is going to talk to Brian
15/03/2022	Set up meeting to discuss #13	Paul is going to take this topic into the PaNET group meeting, our goal is to make the ontologies available as an EOSC service
01/03/2022	Involve HZDRs DPO to check GDPR compliancy of the PaN training platform	still ongoing
01/03/2022	Justify and close issue #22	still ongoing
01/03/2022	See with WG6 for a possible LEAPS Zenodo community	still ongoing
23/11/2021	Raise lack of reporting on data topics in the facilities’ annual reports	still ongoing

Status quo per WP

WP1

Nothing to report.

WP2

The FAIR self assessment workshop was successful. 9 of 10 facilities have attended and have presented their results.

WP3

Nothing to report.

WP4

Nothing to report.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

Abstract submitted to EOSC symposium , to users meeting at SOLEIL, to LEAPS.

Contact made to running H2020 and HE projects (LEAPS-INNOV, ERImote, ReMade).

With diamond creation of tab devoted to the PaN training in the ExPaNDS web site.

Organisation of workshops ongoing.

WP6

Thibaud will keep in touch with all WPs to connect and to collect information about the upcoming events and workshops. Kat offers help for the set up.

The VISA workshop was very successful. Kat was asked for the presentations and recordings. She is going to upload this to Zenodo.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2022

10/10 - 13/10	IBERGRID 2022	Faro
18/10	3rd PaN EOSC Symposium @ICRI2022	Brno and online
02/11-03/11	PaNOSC/ExPaNDS joint WP3 workshop	Saint Aubain (SOLEIL)
14/11-17/11	EOSC Symposium	Prague

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Carlo, Ana, Isabelle, Thibaud

Introduction

Isabelle introduces Thibaud, who will work at Diamond for WP6. Kat now has a new position at Diamond. Everybody welcomes Thibaud.

ExPaNDS - User meeting and final meeting

All attendees agree that the user meeting and final meeting should be in Hamburg next to the XFEL and DESY user meeting.

ExPaNDS internal: 23rd January 2023 PM and 24th January 2023 PM

Open User Meeting: 24th January 2023 AM

The DESY user meeting is the largest attended user meeting.

A remote option is needed for the people who cannot attend in person.

The open user meeting will include showing the key results of the technical WPs (organized by WP5).

WP5 PaN training platform awareness

At the ESUO ExPaNDS has gotten some feedback during the poster session, where the training platform was presented. The attendees have seen the benefits of the platform, but they did not understand that it is for the whole PaN community and not only for ExPaNDS results. The ESUO agreed that the key message is that it is a collaborative project and a joint platform.

The platform will also be presented at NOBUGS and at the EGI conference.

Ana will explore if the platform could be presented at the SOLEIL user meeting. Furthermore the platform should be presented at the EOSC symposium in November.

Project outcomes are both uploaded to the platform by SOLEIL, HZDR and the technical WP partners. WP5 encourages partners to directly upload relevant content or send the info/links to WP5 partners.

Abigail suggests to provide a “how-to-guide” about the requirements of the uploaded content to make it easier. It takes time to upload something when it is not done regularly. The guidelines on how to upload content easily are available in the training platform.

LEAPS is discussing this topic within the new INFRA-EOSC-01-01. There is a good chance to work further on this platform, it must be secured that the results are being continued.

Isabelle suggests to share it on wayforlight.

All libraries and user offices should be contacted for a survey on how the platform should be to work best with it. Ana suggests a workshop with the libraries. Patricks opinion is to do interviews with only one person per library to get useful answers.

Nicolas suggests having a handbook or an instruction for the scientists before they start their work on how to store the data in the best way (FAIR).

Status of the deliverables and milestones

D5.3Annual report on training activities, workshops held, materials published and investigations performed (31/08/2022)

The deliverable is ready for the upload, but the DOI must be confirmed before submitting it to the EU portal.

M17

Training websites and e-platforms online available (31/10/2022)

Linked to D5.4 and ready.

News from PaNOSC

E-Mail by Andy:

In PaNOSC is the summer school is happening this week at ELI-ALPS in Szeged. We have submitted the paper on the PaN community participation in the EOSC to the LEAPS GA which will take place on the 16th. The PaNOSC + ExPANDS outcomes will be presented at NOBUGS next week at PSI.”

Status quo per WP

WP1

Preview of D5.3 is ready.

Paul and Juliane have attended a workshop DAPHNE@DESY organised by Anton and Lisa, which was very helpful for the understanding of the different needs of beamline scientists and IT. Furthermore it helped a lot in connecting the different departments of DESY and raising awareness for ExPaNDS and DAPHNE.

Paul is going to a side-event (interTwin) of the EGI conference next week and Juliane is going to the NOBUGS conference.

WP2

Two deliverables have to be received in November.

For the DMP deliverable, Nicolas and Majid are working on the technical aspects and the description will be sent out.

WP3

On the 2nd and 3rd November will be a joint PaNOSC/ExPaNDS WP3 meeting at SOLEIL

Carlo asks for a summary of the upcoming events. Juliane will attach them under AOB in the minutes.

WP4

Email Majid

Nothing new from WP4 apart from the VISA meeting on Friday for which the organization seems to be finalized.

Email Anton

In addition to Majid’s report - we are going to ask all partners to summarise their efforts during the project and end status

A summary of the WP4-relevent KPIs would be useful so we ask the right questions so as to be able to efficiently answer those questions - I have them somewhere but good to have the ‘official’ list.

WP5

Everything is ready for the VISA workshop on Friday.

Patrick needs to answer Clara the last questions.

There are 82 registrations.

WP6

110 people attended the ALBA user meeting. Kat presented a poster from ExPaNDS.

Another senior level engagement interview has been done at ALBA with Caterina Biscari.

AOB

Upcoming events:

2022

16/09	VISA Workshop	online
19/09-22/09	EGI conference	Prague
19/09	NOBUGS	Villigen (PSI) and online
18/10	3rd PaN EOSC Symposium @ICRI2022	Brno and online
02/11-03/11	PaNOSC/ExPaNDS joint WP3 workshop	Saint Aubain (SOLEIL)
14/11-17/11	EOSC Symposium	Prague

2023

20/01-21/01	SOLEIL Users’ Conference	Saint-Aubin (Soleil)
23/01-24/01	ExPaNDS Final and User meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
25/01	XFEL Users’ meeting	Hamburg (DESY)
26/01-27/01	DESY Photon Science Users’ Meeting	Hamburg (DESY)

🙋 Juliane, Alun, Anton, Majid, Silvan, Ana, Antoine, Isabelle, Kat, Paul

Introduction

WP5 User meeting

Ana asked to add this topic to the agenda again, because she was on holiday and wanted to have an explanation why this meeting was changed into a Diamond user meeting. She also wanted to discuss the proceeding of the WP5 part. As we talked about the user meeting in Brussels four weeks ago, the feedback of the PEB was not very affirmative. Uwe reported that the WP5 user meeting is planned as an online event. After the feedback WP6 decided to change the ExPaNDS meeting into a Diamond user meeting. Isabelle reports that the best time for the meeting would be December (14th and 15th), because in November there are teaching classes. Patrick is not available in December. Juliane will find a meeting slot with Patrick and WP5/WP6 as soon as possible. Kat will invite all WP leaders for a meeting to discuss a user meeting.

Ana suggests including the ExPaNDS user meeting into the SOLEIL user meeting, which takes place between 19th to 20th January 2023.

All agree that we have to plan a final ExPaNDS meeting before the end of the project.

Ana reports that the ESUO and especially the ExPaNDS presentation was well visited. Majid held a presentation, which raised many interesting questions. Ana will send a summary via email.

Deliverables and milestones

D5.3 Annual report on training activities, workshops held, materials published and investigations performed (31/08/2022)

D5.5 Dedicated websites and e-platforms with the teaching material (31/08/2022)

The deliverables are being reviewed at the moment.

M26 Ambassador engagement from all facilities user communities (31/07/2022)

Kat has sent a note to add to the milestone in the EU portal.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Deliverables of WP5 and M26 are being reviewed at the moment.

WP2

Nothing to report.

WP3

WP3 is working on a workshop with Majid, where SOLEIL should be the host.

Another workshop with PaNOSC is being planned.

WP4

Silvan is working on the use cases in a joint activity with Antoine to make the data (CFEL) openly available.

WP4 is preparing the VISA workshop (16th September).

Anton reports that UKRI is not convinced to register as an EOSC service provider. We need to encourage them to do!

WP5

Antoine is working on the workflows for the training platform with Marta. The next workshop is about ptycho-tomography (with Zdenek), but the date is not fixed yet.

WP6

Senior level engagement: Helmut Dosch (DESY) was interviewed last week, Caterina Biscari (ALBA) will be interviewed next week by Kat.

We need a decision if the ICRI 2022 satellite event takes place in person or if it is only a remote meeting.

AOB

Nothing to report.

🙋 Juliane, Brian, Abigail, Carlo, Anton, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Andy, Paul

Introduction

Patrick, Isabelle, Alun and Ana send their apologies.

Deliverables and milestones

D5.3: Annual report on training activities, workshops held, materials published and investigations performed (31/08/2022)

D5.5: Dedicated websites and e-platforms with the teaching material (31/08/2022)

Ana is working on the deliverables.

M26: Ambassador engagement from all facilities user communities (31/07/2022)

Kat will send a note to add to the milestone in the EU portal.

News from PaNOSC

Andy wrote a short abstract for the NOBUGS conference for PaNOSC and ExPaNDS. He asked who is coming to the conference and who would like to present something (poster or presentation). Deadline: 19/08/2022.

Andy is attending the conference and will present both projects, when nobody else is attending. Everyone endorses the abstract and Andy’s idea. The abstract will be submitted if the PaNOSC PMC agrees.

The deliverable D3.4 (Implementation report from facilities) on federated search was submitted and is available on GitHub.

ICRI: Andy and Patrick are still waiting for an invitation for the ICRI. When they will not get one, the consideration is to have only a remote satellite event.

Andy has sent an email about the submission of a paper to the LEAPS + LENS management boards on the continued participation of the PaN community in the building of the EOSC. It has to be submitted in the beginning of September. Please send your feedback until 30th August

Status quo per WP

WP1

Progress report meetings are being prepared. It is hard to find time slots because of the full calendars of the WP leaders.

WP2

The FAIR reporting is going on and a new meeting is being organised for the end of September. The deliverable has to be submitted at the end of November. Simon and Abigail are writing on the full outline for D2.6.

WP3

Carlo is collecting numbers for the KPI’s. Some facilities have gone backwards with their numbers in the survey, which must be validated. Carlo will do that and will catch the missing answers after his holiday in three weeks.

WP4

Anton is monitoring the tasks in his WP regularly in the meetings. It is important to focus on what the people want to deliver at the end of the project.

Abigail would like to know how many registrations from the facilities there are already for EOSC as a service provider. Answer: eight facilities (this is also a KPI)

This is also an important task for WP2, because it is also about the fair use policies to be implemented.

Anton shows the document, in which WP4 is monitoring all the tasks.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

Antoine and Marta are working on the workflows. The last meeting was about Small-Angle Neutron Scattering (STFC, Franz Lang) on 11th August 2022. The next meeting is about Serial Crystallography (DESY, Anton Barty).

WP6

The IXS takes place from 21st to 26th August 2022. Alejandra will present ExPaNDS. WP6 is sponsoring this event with ExPaNDS bottles and bags. Kat is participating in the ALBA user meeting from 5th to 8th September. She is also interviewing Caterina Biscari for the senior level engagement.

For the VISA workshop in September there are already 42 registrants.

Instead of an ExPaNDS user meeting there will be a Diamond user meeting with international scientist with a session for ExPaNDS and PaNOSC.

AOB

Brian and Abigail are not attending the next PEB meeting.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Brian, Nicolas, Alun, Anton, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

Status of deliverables

D6.24 has been uploaded in Zenodo and the EU portal on 29/07/2022.

Presentation of user meeting in Brussels

The meeting is planned to take place 02/ and 03/11/2022 in Brussels. Participants should be users from the different facilities and also EU officers. 300 attendees are planned. The first day starts after lunch with an opening session of Patrick and Andy. After that Roger Ecclestone and Henry Chapman should have a talk. In the evening a working dinner is planned. On the second day satellite events are planned about different use cases (e.g. tomography).

Brian thinks that we need more input for the second day, because otherwise the people will leave after the first day and we would need to make clear who we expect to come to make it attractive. The idea is to have thematic sessions and to discuss how ExPaNDS affects the different communities. The users have to understand how the project ExPaNDS and PaNOSC and especially FAIR data helps their work. Alun adds that the national perspective is also important to show (e.g. DAPHNE and Swiss community). But Patrick points out that we have to be careful to not change the target of the meeting.

Uwe asks if Brussels is the right place for the meeting. For the EU officers it makes sense, but there is no advantage for the users to come to Brussels. Brian adds that we could think about having a side meeting at the EOSC symposium in Prague . Isabell still thinks it should be Brussels because Henry Chapman and Roger Ecclestone can also combine other appointments.

Status of the recommendations from the mid-term review

This topic will be postponed.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Nothing to report.

WP2

Nothing to report.

WP3

Nothing to report.

WP4

Nothing to report-

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

Antoine and Marta are preparing workshops for the workflows of the examples of D4.4 to include in the training platform.

The user meeting will take place in November. It will be an online event like the VISA workshop.

For the VISA workshop there are already 24 registrations.

WP6

The IXS2022 takes place between 21st and 26th August and Kat would like to add a speaker talking about ExPaNDS. She will ask Alejandra to do it.

AOB

Nothing to report.

🙋 Patrick, Brian, Alun, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Andy, Paul

Introduction

Report from Conferences:

Our contribution to the ESOF2022 , European Science Open Forum (online)

• Report by KR
• Event Website
• Abstract submitted for a panel discussion with contribution by ExPaNDS / PaNOSC. ESOC allocated presentation time was for Saturday, 16/7/2022 at 8:00 CEST
• Anticipated low attendance, due to day and timing presentations were pre-recorded and highlighted Open access and Open data.
• Plan to put the recordings to be used and published

Presentations as follows:

• Dr Ben Perry from DNDi covering COVID moonshot
• Dr Claire Walsh from UCL covering the Human Organ Atlas
• Dr Sam Horrell from Diamond Light Source covering Protein Data Bank (PDB)

Panel session. Panellists:

• Isabelle (chair)
• Prof. Andrew Harrison (Diamond) representing LEAPS

PARI: Public awareness of Research Infrastructures 2022

• Event Website
• Kat presented the most recent achievements for ExPaNDS and mentioned our sister project PaNOSC.
• 142 registered participants (60 in-person, 82 remotely) from 24 countries taking part in the conference.

Conference on Inelastic X-ray Scattering IXS 2022

• ExPaNDS sponsorship
• Date: 21 - 26 Aug, 2022

NOBUGS (New Opportunities for Better User Group Software)

• Will take place at PSI, 19 - 22 Sep, 2022
• Nobugs sponsorship is tricky, as we’re not able to raise invoices against member facilities

ESCAPE to the Future

• Will take place in Brussels, 25 - 26 Oct, 2022
• Event Website
• Andy invited as represantative of the PaN cluster

IUCr - International Union of Crystallography

• Will take place in Melbourne, August 2023
• Andy is giving a key-note on PaNOSC and ExPANDS
• Event Website

ICRI side event planned for PaNOSC & ExPaNDS

• Event Website
• Unfortunately the main event is by invitation only, which will likely reduce the number of people coming and enjoying the main event and our side event. That information was only communicated in recent days. We have our doubts that we’ll have a lot of ‘on site’ participation. We’re currently considering whether to hold this as a virtual meeting only.
• It is unclear whether we can step away from the side-event. Considering whether Patrick and Andy travel to be there for these two hours. We would like to avoid having invited speakers present without an actual audience.

ESUO general assembly (Closed conference)

• Will take place at SOLEIL, 29 – 30 August, 2022
• A 15 minutes presentation slot has been secured by AVO and will be delivered by MO.
• Presentation will be based on a selection of slides from the latest deliverable of D6.13

LEAPS general assembly meeting

• 16th September (online)
• 10–15 minutes
• ExPaNDS and PaNOSC continuation within LEAPS
• Andy to send the status of the EOSC-01-01 setting up and the mandate text to be approved by the GA before the 2nd of September
• Ana will present the two questions at the LEAPS
• Status of the INFRA-2023-EOSC-01-01 call
• Request for mandate from LEAPS to represent PaN in this call
• Next plenary meeting will take place 26 - 28 Oct at PSI

Milestones and deliverables

6.13 ExPaNDS presentation for conferences 2022-06-30

This has been delivered and uploaded to the EC portal.

6.24 Senior level engagement 2022-06-30

On-going; however, the deliverable itself is expected for review by lunchtime tomorrow.

Milestone-wise: “there is a plan”.

Upcoming

5.3 Annual report on training activities, workshops held, materials published and investigations performed 2022-08-31

Already updated the Training plan.

5.5 Dedicated websites and e-platforms with the teaching material 2022-08-31

HZDR created a nice Poster presenting the platform. Ana will send Kat the details on the poster. Kat will chase up Facilities to get the poster presented. The poster will essentially become D5.5

2.6 Self-evaluation Photon and Neutron RIs for FAIR data certification 2022-11-30

2.8 Active DMPs for Photon and Neutron RIs 2022-11-30

Status quo per WP

WP1

• Push for the deliverables.
• Collected the financial information from partners.
• Juliane sent around questions about the Review recommendations, (Issue in GitHub), Please respond.

WP2

• Metadata Deliverable D2.7 went in.
• Workshop of the 2022-07-06 on FAIR assessment was successful
• Planning a follow-up workshop on 2022-10-26.

WP3

• Carlo is struggling to get feedback on KPI’s. AA will chase this.
• Planning a joint meeting with PaNOSC in Autumn. Suggest move it. Final date is not confirmed. Week of 31st October.
• Dwindling of staff, delaying activity. AA(PSI) is hosting someone from SOLEIL.

WP4

• Organisation of the workshop around VISA on 16th September.
• Final review of architecture document.

WP5

• VISA Workshop – working in parallel with WP4 and WP6.
• 16th September: 11:00–16:00 CEST. 1 hour lunch break.
• We have a draft agenda (not all speakers are confirmed). We have a text for an email announcement (save the date) and for the website.
• Patrick has agreed to moderate the round-table.
• Next Tuesday (latest) to send the save-the-date email.
• UK raised an issue: wondering what about the VISA workshop that took place in Prague? Shall we collect and make the materials available? We could maybe sell this as a training session? Not sure if the presentations have been collected. Presentations are uploaded to the ELI. KR to check with Teodor to verify the presentations were collected. Training material/videos from SOLEIL that could be used by ExPaNDS. On track for this, more to report at the next PEB.
• Antoine : Implemented the suggestions on the Learning platform from Prague. The code will be deployed this evening.
• Ana wouldn’t be able to attend the meeting 2022-08-02 (next PEB).

WP6

• D6.13 has been delivered.
• D6.24 successfully Andrew Harrison (Diamond) and Robert. This is to support senior management endorsement.
• Upcoming interviews
• 2022-08-26 DESY (Helmut Dosch)
• 2022-09-05 ALBA (Caterina Biscari)
• European PaN meeting 2 – 3 November in Brussels is pending a final location, numbers, agenda etc.

AOB

Nothing to report.

🙋 Juliane, Abigail, Nicolas, Anton, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Isabelle, Kat, Andy, Paul

Introduction

Deliverables will be discussed during the status quo per WP.

News from PaNOSC and EOSC

A “Science Clusters” collaboration workshop took place in Brussels. It was about future calls. Andy said that PaNOSC and ExPaNDS have to decide if they want to be part of it. The importance for the community is clear. But we still need to convince the top management of the facilities to include data management.

Three calls are interesting for us:

EOSC-01-01: all clusters to be involved, 18 Mio. € to fund smaller projects from the community, 1 Mio. € per project, could be shared by two communities.

EOSC-01-02: enabling FAIR and EOSC ecosystem.

EOSC-01-03: tracking scientific knowledge.

These future calls will be discussed in the next PMC meeting of PaNOSC and the facilities should decide if they want to be part of them.

An EOSC association meeting has taken place. It was about how EOSC will work with the clusters and how to bring EOSC forward, because it is still not clear, what the EOSC is. Andy wants to work as a community, because projects have a rather short lifetime. Majid asked if we can act under an umbrella to make us more visible for EOSC. But Andy remarks, that our facilities are not equipped enough. Nearly no facility has created a permanent job for data management.

Isabelle reports that the Oxford university has opened an office in Berlin to be still part of the EU projects. Also Diamond is thinking about this possibility. D4.3 (Remote desktop and Jupyter analysis service deployed at EOSC) deliverable is going to be finished in the next weeks.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Patrick, Paul and Juliane discussed the recommendations of the last review and had a look on what must be done until the end of the project. Juliane needs to sort the recommendations and will contact the WP leaders in case of any questions.

WP2

D2.7 is ready, Kat will upload it to Zenodo and Juliane will upload it to the EU portal.

The template of the FAIR assessment deliverable will be discussed in a workshop on 07/07 with all survey coordinators of the partner facilities.

WP3

Nothing to report.

WP4

Majid reports about the VISA workshop, which is being organised at the moment (see WP5).

D1.6 was reviewed and there is a final meeting on 08/07.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

The organising committee of the VISA workshop had their first meeting, where they planned the first draft of the agenda. It will be an online meeting with a short introduction of both projects (PaNOSC and ExPaNDS). Afterwards WP4 of ExPaNDS will be introduced and two demos will be presented (DESY, ILL). The main audience are the beamline scientists. Another session will be open to everybody and the VISA deployment (DESY, ESRF, XFEL, SOLEIL) will be shown. ILL is going to talk about the development and future collaborations. At the end of the workshop there will be a round table about the sustainability of VISA. Majid reckons that the most important part of the workshop is the message to the directors, to roll out VISA. Paul suggests to do a hands on session on good technique. This is needed by everyone with a working VISA portal. VISA is a remote data analysis platform that has been adopted in the PaNOSC project. Jamie Hall was the main developer.

WP6

The senior engagement deliverable D6.24 is ongoing. Two videos with Andrew Harrison (DIAMOND) and Roger Eccleston (ISIS) are ready. Three more videos are planned. We have to make sure that the directors and the top management are aware of the open data management to generate enough resources inside the facilities.

Isabelle also reports about some use cases. For example a tomography on the char of a walnut, which can be used in filters for capturing antibiotics. Furthermore there is a use case with Thermo Fisher, which is not open source, but can lead to potental services from the industry.

WP6 and WP1 are going to start the planning for the user meeting in Brussels, where we want to present use cases. Isabelle and Kat ask for use cases to present and also to participate in the organising committee. Abigail asked if we can use the use cases for the DMP task (D2.8) that Heike is working on. Isabelle suggests to talk to Elliot and Alejandra. Ana asked if the training platform is also part of the plan for the user meeting. Isabelle agreed that this topic is important and WP6 is looking forward to input. Andy remarks that we have to clarify for every use case why it is an EOSC demo.

AOB

Nothing to report.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Silvan, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Paul

Introduction

The face to face meeting was successful. The technical and also the training sessions were very fruitful. The people attending remote had some trouble understanding and hearing the people in the room. It was highlighted that it helped writing the questions being asked in the auditorium in the chat, to aid remote users. This should be improved for the next hybrid meeting. Furthermore Abigail suggested handing out a list of participants. We thank Teodor and ELI for their support in organising and hosting the event.

D2.7 Reviews will be edited by Nicolas. Delivery planned until the end of next week.

D1.6 Patrick thanks all contributors, Isabelle offers her help with the review.

D6.06 Deliverable has been uploaded this week.

D6.13 Kat asks for one or two slides of each WP with the achievements so far. She will send a template for the slides.

D6.24 Isabelle and Kat are working on small videos. One director (DIAMOND) was already interviewed, another interview is fixed for next week (ISIS Neutron and Muon Source), two further interviews are being planned at the moment. The detailed plan will be submitted with the deliverable.

M26 Isabelle proposes to do a mailing cascade with the national user communities and to refer to the meeting, planned for November in Brussels.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Juliane has spoken to Teodor, Marta and Guiseppe about the EGI conference. We submitted an abstract for ExPaNDS/PaNOSC and will present two use cases and the collaboration with EGI in eight minutes.

WP2

Brian and Abigail need DESY, HZDR and ELETTRA to confirm the coordinators for the FAIR assessment survey.

WP3

Nothing to report.

WP4

Silvan speaks with Anton about being the coordinator for the fair assessment survey (for WP2).

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

Ana and Isabelle will merge the workshops in November. There will be an ExPaNDS meeting in Brussels, where use cases (e.g. heritage, tomography filters, pandemic) will be shown. WP5 organizes a workshop (user journey), where the main ExPaNDS results will be presented to the users.

The last workshop of WP5 is the VISA workshop discussed in Prague.

WP6

Deliverables have been already discussed in the beginning of the meeting (see 1).

AOB

Nothing to report.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Carlo, Anton, Majid, Silvan, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Paul

Introduction

The agenda for the face to face meeting is being finalized. The PaNET session will be chaired by Paul and Carlo. Abigails asks about the technical conditions at ELI and how the remote people can attend. Kat will check that and inform the attendees. Anton would like to have a sum up from ExPaNDS with the lighthouse projects that can be presented at the review.

The EGI conference takes place 20/09-22/09 in Prague. Lots of EOSC projects will be presented. We would like to present a use case of ExPaNDS. PaNOSC is also presenting a use case and an open data computing model for ELI ERIC. The NoBUGS conference takes place at the same time, most of the people from ExPaNDS can’t attend the EGI conference.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Juliane is working on the finalisation of the face to face agenda.

WP2

D2.7 is being review and will be ready in 1-2 weeks.

The FAIR assessment template is advanced and is ready at the end of the month. The initial workshop is on 6th of July with a representative of each facility of the project. The questions of the survey will be presented and open points will be clarified. The survey is open until the end of September, where in another workshop the facilities will present an overview of their responses and how/if the excercise was helpful for them in relation to their goals around FAIR data.. By returning their completed survey reports to WP2, facilities are agreeing to having their reports open published as part of D2.6. This will be made clear both in the workshop itself and via a statement included on the survey. To this end, facilities will need to ensure they have the necessary sign off from whoevers needs to do the sign off at their facility.

Heike is preparing the workshop at the face to face meeting about DMPs (D2.8).

WP3

Rolf suggested a workshop for the users of PIDs at the face to face meeting. Paul is needed for the discussion. There will be a hands on session (hackathon) from Max about the integration of the poral and the search API.

WP4

Silvan prepared the demo setups. Majid is contributing in D1.6. Majid would like to talk to Jamie about the compute API. The use case demo from XFEL containers will be discussed in 20-30 min.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

Technical deployments are ongoing.

Ana and her team are organising their sessions for the f2f meeting.

5.3 and D5.5 are being prepared.

Ana encourages all WP leaders to join the discussion about the PID workshop.

WP6

D6.6 is ready.

Next conferences are the ESOF in Leiden (13-16 July 2022) and the PARI in the UK (18-20 July 2022).

AOB

Nothing to report.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Carlo, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat

Introduction

The agenda for the f2f meeting must be planned.

There is a Nobugs conference in September at PSI. Is there a possibility for sponsoring? Alan to discuss offline with Kat.

Face to face meeting

All inputs from ExPaNDS and PaNOSC were summarised by Nicoletta in this document. At the moment there are 47 registrations (16 online). Patrick asked all WP leaders about their session plans.

WP2

Technical session

• Discuss some of the reasons why facilities would like to support DMPs
• Best case: input to support direction of next deliverable
• Discuss with Andy from PaNOSC
• 1 h 15 min needed

Training session

• At least one training element (e.g. document, recorded workshop) for each WP2 topic

Communication session

• How can we show the results of ExPaNDS to a larger community
• Nicolas to discuss with Kat

Sustainability session

• FAIR data assessment

WP3

Tomorrow is a WP3 meeting, afterwards Alun and Carlo will deliver us the missing information.

There will be a coding session with Massimiliano, Carlo, Jiri, Axel, Kris and Stefan about search API. Carlo will keep us up to date.

WP4

Technical session: VISA portal.

Patrick asks Anton and Majid to deliver their session input until next Monday.

WP5

Technical session

• Which features does the community need?

Training session

• The most important thing is the discussion, how the WP leaders can contribute to the training platform

Sustainability session

• More political discussion about how to secure the training when ExPaNDS has finished

Communication session

• Ana would like to talk to Kat

WP6

Kat will support solving the technical issues of the hybrid meeting.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Juliane is in contact with a German project, which secures the sustainability of ExPaNDS. It is called DAPHNE (DAta for PHoton and Neutron Experiments) and is about data management.

WP2

The D2.8 (DMP) meeting is every two weeks.

Simon Lambert is a new colleague and is working on the FAIR evaluation task. A template with questions will be provided to the facilities. A coordinator from each facility will be asked to have the responsibility to collect all responses and to ensure the written report is passed back to WP2 by the deadline of 1st October.

WP3

WP3 meeting is on 25th May. Discussion will be about the topics of the f2f meeting. Carlos improved the search API portal.

WP4

Nothing to report.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) pan-training.eu or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu). Oliver and Antoine are working on technical developments, among them the full implementation of the ontology in the training platform.

Furthermore, Carlo and Antoine have created a workflow with training materials from WP3 (data catalogue services, including ontologies).

WP6

D6.6 is ready for review next week.

ExPaNDS is sponsoring the IXS 2022 in Oxford.

The senior level engagement (D6.24) is ongoing. The idea was to go to the LEAPS directors meeting and interview the directors with the help of a crew from Diamond for a video.

WP6 with PaNOSC have submitted an abstract for the ESOF in Leiden (13-16 July 2022), which has been accepted and is taking place 16th July in form of an online conference session, which is for 1 hour and 15 minutes in the presence of a moderator. Each panel member will give a 10-minute talk each, which will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience. The topic is open data for healthier societies.

AOB

Nothing to report.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Carlo, Anton, Majid, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Paul

Introduction

The f2f meeting must be planned. We will decide this evening if it takes place in June.

f2f meeting

Patrick, Paul and Juliane started a document for collecting topics. Juliane will transfer the topics that were already submitted with the survey (from Kat and Nicoletta). WP leaders, please check if there is anything else that we should discuss and enter people that you would like to meet there or that represent your work package.

The number of people attending from ExPaNDS is limited to 25.

The meeting will be planned as a hybrid meeting.

Status quo per WP

WP1

All financial interim reports from the partners have been obtained. We are underspending and have sent some questions to the facilities and are waiting for feedback.

The H2020 survey of the EOSC Association was submitted on 29th April.

Marta and Juliane are working on the PaN scenarios for D1.6 (General architecture description in relation to the EOSC service). They need help from Majid and Paul.

WP2

D2.7 is being completed this week and will be ready for review. Reviewers are Kat, Patrick and Darren.

The FAIR assessment workshop will take place on 6th July.

The kick off meeting for D2.8 took place on 6th May.

WP3

UmbrellaID workshop took place on 3rd May.

WP3 is helping other facilities with data catalogues and SciCat (e.g. DESY, SOLEIL).

WP4

The last meetings were dedicated to other WP’s (eg. WP5 and WP2)

Next steps will be the 2f2 meeting in June and the VISA and SciCat workshops in July.

WP5

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) ((pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

Joint presentation of the training platform at the LEAPS/LENS IT group meeting (09/05) by Uwe. Topics to clarify:

Sustainability: is the platform sustainable? A suggestion was to have DOI’s for every training material. Is a YouTube link sustainable?

Licenses: Who has the license when uploading a teaching video? Does the platform has the license or the speaker?

WP6

D6.6 will be ready for review next week.

The senior level engagement is ongoing and Patrick will go to Brussels to meet the LEAPS directors and make an interview with the help of a crew from Diamond.

WP6 has ongoing meetings with WP1 and WP2, but needs to meet with WP3, WP4 and WP5.

AOB

Majid suggests to have an own icon on the EOSC market place for PaN. Patrick gives to consider that we do not have a logo for PaN in general. In the side bar search there is already a subitem “EOSC PaN”. Paul suggests to rename this into “PaN”. He will contact the EOSC market place.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Carlo, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Isabelle, Kat, Andy, Paul

Introduction

Face-to-face-meeting

• Date: 14-15 June 2022
• Location: ELI’-ERIC, near Prague
• Who: ExPaNDS and PaNOSC

Alun, Abigail, Antoine and Anton are not able to attend in person. Abigail reminded the PEB that we did agree previously within the PEB to offer any in-person events also as a hybrid option for the remainder of the project.

For WP3 Carlo and Krisztian are attending.

For WP4 Majid is attending.

Goal of this meeting is to work on the topics of the DOW and their status for the final report.

Members of the preparation meeting are Patrick, Kat and Juliane from ExPaNDS and Andy, Nicoletta, Jordi and Teodor from PaNOSC.

EOSC Association Survey

The EOSC Association Board meets ongoing Horizon 2020 INFRA-EOSC Projects. They set up a survey to define KERs of the projects and sort them within the EOSC agility groups and task forces.

Patrick, Paul and Juliane defined the KERs and have filled in the survey roughly. Now input of the WP leaders is required for finishing the survey until Thursday afternoon.

Status quo per WP

WP1

All financial interim reports from the partners have been delivered.

Majid helped Marta and Juliane with the PaN scenarios for D1.6 (General architecture description in relation to the EOSC service).

WP2

D2.7 is progressing. Nicolas (task lead) has distributed ‘homework’ to task contributors, so everyone should be clear on which sections they need to write/finalise. With timely contributions from colleagues, Nicolas aims to have the document ready to go for internal review around mid-May.

Work on task 2.5 (FAIR assessment) is ongoing. A preliminary list of questions for the survey is now complete. Next steps include refining and reducing the number of questions to a manageable number. Given the complexity of finalising the survey and accompanying contextual information, it seems likely that we will postpone the 25th May workshop by a few weeks (possibly until after the planned June PaNOSC/ExPaNDS meeting?) Abigail to discuss a new date further with task participants and then with Kat.

A kick off meeting for the second deliverable associated with the DMP work (task 2.2) is planned for 6th May. Final details about the meeting to be sent out by Heike (task lead).

WP3

Nothing to report.

WP4

Nothing to report.

WP5

WP5 is looking for new material for the training platform.

Ana encourages partners to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) ((pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu).

Other topics:

- Small aesthetic changes done and new materials uploaded to the catalogue since the last meeting. UmbrellaID Workshop (03/05) added as an event to the training platform

- Leaps Quantum conference (May 2022, ELBA): Oliver will attend the event. There will be a poster presenting the training catalogue with a link to the platform

- Joint presentation of the training platform at the LEAPS/LENS IT group meeting (09/05) by Uwe, Ana and Andrew confirmed

- LEAPS/LENS NEXUS presentations compilation: Ana asked Andy Goetz if he can put Nexus presentations from WG3 LENS/LEAPS on Zenodo if he thinks that is pertinent. The final objective is to make them available via the training catalogue.

WP6

Nothing to report.

AOB

Nothing to report.

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Abigail, Nicolas, Carlo, Anton, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Paul

Introduction

D3.4 has been submitted. Patrick thanks all authors and reviewers.

Patrick is waiting for feedback from the project officer about the sponsoring of the McXTrace training session at SOLEIL and a 3-month extension of the FAIR assessment task (#36).

Finding a slot for the preparation meeting for the face-to-face-meeting of PaNOSC and ExPaNDS is difficult. Participants: Kat, Patrick, Juliane, Nicoletta, Jordi, Teodor.

Status quo per WP

WP1

The financial interim report from UKRI will be delivered on Thursday (14/04(22). All other reports were delivered. Paul, Marta and Juliane are working on the PaN scenarios for D1.6 (General architecture description in relation to the EOSC service). Patrick asks if UKRI has PM left. Abigail says that we have to talk to Brian about that, because he has already some ideas.

WP2

D2.7 is in progress and needs to be tied up. There is much input from different people, especially WP3 and WP4. Abigail and Brian discussed if the deliverable could be submitted a few weeks later, because there is still so much new input. Patrick suggests to reduce the review time but keep end of May as the submission date. Abigail and Nicolas discuss the maturity level of the contributions and the overall picture. Abigail mentions that on her point of view some points (e.g. NeXus) are very technical in nature, which in practice means that only a few people from the wider group working on the deliverable are actually able to contribute to these aspects of the deliverable. Patrick states that D2.7 is a very important deliverable. Isabelle and Brian would like to review the document. For the FAIR assessment task there will be another meeting to set up a survey (25th May). This meeting is to present the survey questions to the facilities, explain the self-assessment process, and answer any questions from facilities about what we are asking them to do. This is planned for the facilities and they should give their input on a new approach for FAIR data assessment. In September there should be a second meeting about the results. Abigail points out that there is no deliverable for training in WP2, i.e. as opposed to the situation in WP3, where there is a clear deliverable related to training. In the other WPs, training material needs to be prepared as well, but we don't have the advantage of it being presented as a formal deliverable. Rather, it is soert of mandatory extra. Patrick claims that it is cleary documented and the reviewers know.

WP3

Upcoming workshops: UmbrellaID (May 2022) Data catalogue

WP4

Krisztian has set up a weekly meeting to discuss the WP4 part for D2.7. It takes place every Thursday at 3 pm. Everyone is invited to give input. Last friday the WP4/WP5 meeting took place. Majid suggested two use cases, one from DESY and one from SOLEIL. Kat suggested another tomography use case from Diamond, which is for the industry.

WP5

Antoine has resolved the issue #34 on Github. Next step should be to open the training platform to everybody (outside ExPaNDS and PaNOSC). Ana encourages partners/attendees to upload relevant materials to the training platform (Materials - PaN Training Catalogue (ExPaNDS/PaNOSC) (pan-training.eu)) or send them to the WP5 mailing list (wp5@expands.eu). On 8th of April the EOSC France workshop took place and Ana presented the ExPaNDS training platform. Around 100 people were attending, including a Research Ministry representative. The presentations should be uploaded in Zenodo and linked at our website and training platform. Ana and Uwe were also invited to present our training and learning platform at a LEAPS and LENS Working group 3 (9th May 2022). The interest in the training platform is growing. HZDR could take over the platform after the project, but there must be continuous input from further projects but independent from any further EU money. Uwe points out that for some topics there is more movement in LEAPS working groups than in ExPaNDS (e.g. NeXus). The next WP5 meeting takes place on Thursday at 11 am.

WP6

Three international meeting are planned. Sponsorship of IXS 2022 has been taken over. Unfortunately we missed the due date for Scidata Convention in Seoul.

AOB

Nothing to report

🙋 Patrick, Juliane, Brian, Nicolas, Alun, Carlo, Anton, Majid, Ana, Uwe, Kat, Paul

Introduction

Introduction

Patrick describes the status of the deliverables:

D4.4 is uploaded.

D3.4 is in good shape. A second reviewer is needed. Kat is going to review until mid of next week.

D2.7 is in progress and will be ready end of May. Brian would like to review D2.7.

D1.6 needs still some work, but the quality is really important here and we should not rush.

Patrick is going to write an e-mail to the project officer to ask for the sponsoring of the McXTrace training session at SOLEIL and to ask about a 3-month extension of the FAIR assessment task (#36).

Kat reports that there are no news about the all-hands-meeting, but it should take place before november.

Ana had some difficulties to find a slot for the preparation meeting for the training. It is possible to use the slot from WP 4: 8th of April 10 a.m. Ana and Uwe have to meet before.

PaNOSC (was not part of the meeting, but was included afterwards)

Andy Goetz gave an update via e-mail:

PaNOSC received a long report from our PO on the 36M Periodic Report. It is +ve and acknowledges the good results from PaNOSC.

It includes some suggestions for changes which need to be implement before the final periodic report.

We can share the report with the ExPaNDs PEB if you are interested.

There will be a 2 day face-2-face meeting of the PaNSOC search portal developers next week at the ESRF to discuss what still needs to be implemented and review the code for the future the draft text from the EU for calls in 2023-2024 includes a call for continuing the work of the clusters in some form. One idea is it could be an opportunity to work on a Data Commons for LEAPS but of course we need to discuss this in more depth together

Deliverable D3.3 on the Catalog Services has been submitted

PaNOSC will be presented at the SRI meeting on Thursday afternoon there are a number of events coming up which can be found on the

PaNOSC website: https://www.panosc.eu/events/

Status quo per WP

WP1

The following interim financial reports are still needed:

DESY

Elettra

MAX IV

PSI

SOLEIL

UKRI

Deadline is the 31st of March 2022.

WP2

D2.7 and D2.6 are in progress. There will be a survey/consultation about the FAIR matrix, the workshop is planned end of May (with Abigail).

WP3

Carlo needs input for the D3.4 from DAPHNE, Anton will ask Brigitte for the missing document.

Upcoming workshops:

Differences of SciCat and ICat (4th April 2022)

UmbrellaID (May 2022)

WP4

The focus is more on visualisation than at the Jupyter notebook at the moment. A WP4-WP5 meeting is planned on the 08/04. This meeting aims to clarify the expectactions of EC and how WP5 could support WP4 activities (identify key materials to be posted to the platform and help WP4 to upload them, discuss WS/training that you need to organise to fulfill WP4 objectives and how these events can be showcased and promoted to EC with the support of WP5/6, submit you our ideas for WS/training ...)

WP5

WP5 is looking for new material for the training platform: Project partners, LEAPS, LENS, Hercules school…and encourages ExPANDS partners to upload materials on the platform or send the information to the WP5. There is a LEAPS and LENS workshop about NeXus, this information could be taken from the expands workshop about NeXus.

WP6

WP6 had an internal meeting and is working on three use cases (Covid, reflectometry and tomography). They prepare a roadmap. There is an industry case study with ThermoFisher ongoing.

AOB

04/04 and 05/04: EOSC France workshop (in French) online 25th May: FAIR workshop 21/08-26/08: IXS 2022

🙋 Brian, Nicolas, Alun, Carlo, Ana, Antoine, Kat, Paul, Juliane

Introduction

Introduction

Juliane Marauska is the replacement of Sophie Servan at DESY and introduced herself. The other PEB members also introduced themselves.

Status of open issues

The open issues can be found for each WP (see next chapter).

Status quo per WP

WP1

The deadline for the 2nd interim financial report (#41) is the 31st of March 2022. Once every report is collated, WP1 will be able to check deviations to the “recovery plan” presented at mid-term review for our underspending.

Contacting the project manager via office@expands.eu. Recipients are: Patrick, Paul, Sophie and Juliane.

The project speed will eventually decrease because there was no overlap of working time of Sophie and Juliane.

WP2

For WP2, consultation workshops for D2.3 covered detailed policy consultation. Metadata workshop on 1 March 2022 received feedback from partners to contribute to D2.7 (#17).

Patrick will ask the PO about a 3-month extension of the FAIR assessment task (#36).

It was discussed where the doubts of the senior management on the FAIR data are (#32). Are they reputational or more financial?

Brian is preparing a FAIR assessment workshop with Kat at the end of May 2022.

There was a workshop for D2.7 two weeks ago, it will be published in May 2022.

WP3

Deliverable 3.3 was published on 16th March 2022.

Deliverable 3.4 will be sent out next week.

The onboarding of the ontologies as an EOSC service (#13) was discussed. It must be justified of ZENODO is an EOSC service. Kat will set up a meeting to discuss this issue.

WP4

D4.4 is being reviewed at the moment. The technical architecture enhancements (#16) are discussed in regular meetings. The next meeting is on 7th April 2022.

WP5

Sponsorship of McXtrace training session at soleil (#37) will be discussed by Patrick with the PO. WP5 is working with WP3 for more training material.

WP6

Nothing to report.

🙋 Sophie, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Majid, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Paul

Introduction

Status of open issues

As discussed during the last PEB, we reviewed the open issues for each WP (see respective subsections of next chapter).

Status quo per WP

WP1

The 2nd interim financial report of M30 starting today, Sophie sent around the request to all our financial contacts at partner facilities to provide the spendings for ExPaNDS since the beginning of the project until the end of Feb. 2022, for each WP, in PMs and in €. Once every report is collated, WP1 will be able to check deviations to the “recovery plan” presented at mid-term review for our underspending.

Progress reports for WP1 and WP5 were updated and are now available online:

• WP1 progress report
• WP5 progress report

Following Paul’s suggestion, WP1 created a new wiki page serving as a catalogue of ExPaNDS presentations. The aim is to have a landing page for all internal and external workshops ExPaNDS organised or was significantly represented. Contributions are welcome for any missing event.

The objectives dashboard is also up-to-date and Sophie added a proposal for WP5- and WP6- related objectives, to be discussed during the next catch-ups.

As mentioned by email yesterday, Sophie asked the PEB to use office@expands.eu to contact the project manager from now on. Juliane should start on the 14th of March so this will be used for continuity. Recipients are: Patrick, Sophie and Juliane.

WP2

For WP2, issue #17 is covered by the extensive consultation on the data policy framework of each facility’s policy makers, which led to its final version. Additionally, the workshop tomorrow is a cornerstone in the plan to validate the metadata framework, which covers the second aspect of the recommendation. Abigail will close the issue with the appropriate justification, after checking with Brian.

Issue #19 is supposed to be addressed in the frame of the FAIR assessment task, Abigail will confirm how exactly with Brian too.

The internal review of the PID infrastructure deliverable was finished as planned last Friday. Vasily and co-authors are taking the comments into account and will be finished by Thursday, so Sophie can publish on Friday.

Brian asked offline for a 3-months extension of the FAIR assessment task, because of its possible dependency on the metadata framework but mainly because the task is important and deserves the extra attention. Sophie and Patrick agreed and will ask the PO if we can delay the delivery for D2.6 to November 22.

Abigail reported an issue raised during the last WP2 monthly meeting about checking the services we use in the frame of the project were GDPR compliant: e.g. bioportal, Zenodo, GitHub and asked for WP1 guidance. When someone offers services to people located in the EEA, they have to be GDPR-compliant so WP1 is not checking that. Our contribution is limited to what we directly develop, e.g. the PaN training portal. Uwe suggested involving their HZDR DPO to check everything there was in order.

Alun informed us that PSI had a new documented procedure for research data management that Gerd managed to get published at the end of Feb. A new data policy will be derived from it, with much input from ExPaNDS and PaNOSC frameworks.

WP3

WP3 met with Ana to discuss training for WP3, which was helpful to prepare for the next upcoming deliverable. D3.3 on SciCat and ICAT demonstrators is being internally reviewed and finalised. It should be published by the end of the week.

About the issues, #13 on onboarding the PaNET ontology as an EOSC service needs to be addressed. About issue #21, Paul reminded the importance, for sustainability, of building a community around the ontology maintenance, starting by defining a clear release management (see related issue #46 in the ontology repository). Isabelle mentioned the NeXus community as a good role model to follow.

WP4

Majid will check issue #22 is covered by the testing framework during the next WP4 meeting. He hopes to have the deliverable on analysis prototypes (D4.4) finished by the end of week, reviewed and then published by mid-March. One pipeline is missing but will be done by Friday and a few facilities' infrastructures still need to be described.

WP4 is testing the use of Singularity instead of Docker to facilitate launching containers on different infrastructures.

WP5

In the frame of issue #18, Antoine mentioned WP5 was getting closer to LENS for more neutron content (WIP).

On the duplication issue #34, WP5 considers the two workflow features to be complementary. Sophie asked Antoine for a quick explanation of the different features and their complementarity and that he could then close the issue.

Following the PaNET ontology workshop of WP3, Paul suggested using PaNET in the search feature of the training catalogue, not only as controlled vocabulary but also to enhance search results (returning results from “children” terms too). Antoine has taken this suggestion onboard and WP5 is working on implementing it.

Login with UmbrellaID works for the PaN training catalogue since this morning!

Following PaNOSC’s review of their WP8 last week, Sophie reported a few points:

• careful with content curation: there should be a (human) filter when automatically harvesting LEAPS events e.g. as all of them are not relevant for training. Antoine is aware of the issue and already has some ideas on how to solve it.
• Once the domain name is final, Umbrella is working and the notebooks are completely operational (i.e. in 2-3 months), there will be an official launch of pan-training.eu commonly orchestrated by ExPaNDS and PaNOSC comms teams. Nicoletta will be in touch with our WP6.
• By then, pan-training.eu shall be onboarded to EOSC, instead of pan-learning.org (with HZDR as a provider then?).

WP6

Isabelle offered that WP6 took over the action to ask LEAPS if they would curate a Zenodo community, including ExPaNDS content, that could be sustained after the project ends. Kat will get in touch in the frame of her involvement in LEAPS WG6.

WP6 is currently focusing on driving the content behind the different use cases. In addition to finishing the 2 pending deliverables - which will be sent tomorrow for internal review - Kat is helping WP2 and WP3 in the organisation of their respective upcoming workshops:

• Metadata framework validation tomorrow,
• FAIR assessment workshop in May/June,
• Workshop on metadata catalogues (Rolf) in April.

Kat also announced we would sponsor a new international conference: the IXS2022.

🙋 Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Carlo, Anton, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Paul

Introduction

News from PaNOSC

• The 2nd periodic report from PaNOSC was submitted at the end of January 22,
• The fourth instalment of the internal financial report at M36 was prepared and shared,
• WP3 is working on D3.3 on federated catalogues (due end of March), a work closely related to our own D3.3.

Andy also mentioned we need to discuss our combined face-2-face meeting before the end of the two projects. Kat will follow-up on this topic, gathering the organisational committee for a meeting. The foreseen hosting facility is ELI but this is not yet confirmed and the choice is still open.

Status of open issues

Sophie asked each WP to check their open issues from ExPaNDS GitHub before the next PEB, so we can make a status point. A filter on the labels can be used so only issues concerning one WP are displayed.

For the issue #20 that comes from the mid-term review recommendation to have a catalogue of FAIR tools, after several discussions we suggest to solve it using the PaN training catalogue with “tool” as resource type and include only tools developed by either ExPaNDS or PaNOSC or recommended in one of our deliverables. There are already some examples there: RDMO, PaN software catalogue, PaN ontology.
Uwe and Antoine agreed on the principle. Sophie will give WP5 a bit of time in case an argument against it comes up but otherwise will close the issue.

ExPaNDS’s Zenodo community

Sophie suggested we better distribute the responsibility for the curation of the metadata records and DOIs for material uploaded to Zenodo in the frame of the project. The curation rights cannot be transferred from one person to the other so it can become a problem for stale uploads for example (see example of issue #36).

From now on, main authors will be encouraged to curate their own document, following the good practices that are described in ExPaNDS wiki. Kat is the curator of the community, she will check these are correct before accepting a new entry in the ExPaNDS community.

Status quo per WP

WP1

In the architecture, Sophie mentioned one of the newly introduced “PaN scenarios” is using the PaN training catalogue’s workflow feature to link the reference datasets with their analysis pipelines.

The first meeting for the working group on onboarding was last week.

DESY found a replacement for a project manager during Sophie’s leave, she will be starting in early March (if everything goes to plan!).

WP2

The deliverable on PIDs was sent around by Vasily for internal review last Friday. The reviewers have until the 25th to send their feedback.

WP2 is preparing the upcoming workshop on metadata issues (taking place on 02.03.2022). It will feed into D2.7, which are the final recommendations for FAIR PaN data management, and vice versa. For now the work on D2.7 is mostly to align the views of the different contributors, which is taking time but Nicolas sees good progress.
Paul noted we should be careful with WP4 interfaces in this document, especially on:

• the fact that NeXus is identified as a major conveyor of metadata (is that the case for reference datasets e.g.?)
• and that at the data analysis stage in the experimental life cycle, one needs to include provenance information.

We should make sure WP4 is aligned with these statements (and applies them).

Another task is running in WP2 on FAIR evaluation. UKRI is preparing guidance notes and questions to be sent around to partners, after the workshop on metadata. The slides Brian showed at the extended PEB on the strategy for FAIR assessment were shared with the group (on eb@expands.eu) and are also available in SharePoint (in WP2 folder). WP2 will start organising the subsequent workshop foreseen in May/June with Kat.

The data policy guidance note is now published in Zenodo so it will now be linked in the training platform too.

Brian also mentioned participating in a preparation meeting for a workshop on policies with the other INFRA-EOSC-5 projects. The event is planned for the 3rd of May, and is really focusing on national and regional projects; he found it hard to find the right level for ExPaNDS to contribute.

WP3

PSI’s open data portal is now a registered service in the EOSC marketplace!

WP3 has been working on deliverable 3.3 which should be available tomorrow for internal review. It contains the description of the whole PaN search API stack deployed at MAX IV, examples implementations from ICAT and also the description of the ontology implementation, available independently of any catalogue.

Regarding the upcoming portfolio material for training, its content was discussed and it was agreed it should explain what material was already produced and what will come next, in particular the workshops. This should be discussed with Ana too, in line with the overall training plan of WP5.

WP4

Majid is getting the upcoming deliverable together, the 5 pipelines to be made available in EOSC have been chosen and now each facility responsible for one needs to fill in the document.

Anton reported progress on the containerisation, working on the configuration environment to have consistent ways to mount Slurm e.g. and data repositories, so that it is as transparent as possible to the user.

Uwe noted it was difficult to get commitments from the different facilities, with “silent” participants in WP4 meetings being still an issue. We could be more forceful in asking for answers, taking for example the main objective for WP4 as a “contract” to be filled.

Uwe also suggested offering, in addition to training for the use of the 5 pipelines, specific training workshops on VISA.

WP5

The new design of the PaN training portal is now live. Several new materials were added and thanks to the automatic harvesting of LEAPS and laser-lab events, there are also many new upcoming events.

WP6

This week is “Love your data week”, so Kat is being very active on Twitter for ExPaNDS. Please check, share and retweet.

Every previous event recording and presentations are now available, respectively in expands.eu and in Zenodo: notably the librarian symposium, the PID workshop and the FAIRness of a prototypical PaN instrument presentation.

Kat is working on the 2 outstanding deliverables: the material for international conferences (using Sophie’s presentation at SXNS in January 2022) and the more general upcoming update of the ExPaNDS presentation for conferences. As asked in a separate email, all presentations made recently by someone from the PEB is welcome as input. Please send to Kat or upload to SharePoint.

WP6 and WP1 will need to look for alternatives to the AAAS participation, as it is still planned online and presents less interest in this format. Kat suggested the organisers to co-locate the planned ExPaNDS career-webinar but they admitted they would probably not succeed in getting enough audience for us.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Anton B., Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Andy, Paul

Introduction

Objectives dashboard

Following the extended PEB, Sophie put the objectives dashboards in GitHub’s wiki and asked the PEB if that was fine. Several points were discussed but in principle no one opposed.

• The EOSC provider registration status (objective 4) is a prerequisite to both the analysis service and the data catalogue in EOSC. A registered facility should at least have one service onboarded. It was reminded that the access policy remains in any case in the hands of the facility.
• WP5 and WP6 related objectives are not detailed yet, this will be discussed separately with WP1.

The dashboard is not aimed at being exhaustive on all that we want to achieve in the project, it is to monitor the progress towards the objectives as they were formulated and refined at mid-term. It is a working table that everyone is encouraged to keep up-to-date, so we can focus the last year of the project (that is starting 1st of March) on reaching these objectives.

PSI and WP2

Patrick picked up on the issue raised separately by Brian on the needed involvement of PSI for the FAIR assessment task in WP2. He will organise a meeting with Brian, Alun, Carlo and Abigail.

Status quo per WP

WP1

The architecture update is progressing, we are following the mid-term recommendations to include “PaN scenarios” for an overall validation of the architecture. These are based on the WP6 roadmap use cases. The objective for the delivery of an updated architecture is March 22.

EGI is setting up the EOSC onboarding group, all are invited to register to the dedicated mailing list, a first meeting will be planned soon.

• To subscribe the new mailing list, please write to: eosc-onboarding-expands.eu-subscribe@desy.de
• To post in the list, please write to: eosc-onboarding@expands.eu

Sophie reminded the PEB of the upcoming interim report to check PMs and € spending per WP and per partner for the period going from M19 to M30. She will distribute the instructions to the list of finance contacts on the 1st of March with one month to collect them. Results and analysis are then expected in April.

WP2

Vasily is working on the upcoming 2.5 deliverable on PIDs. Abigail suggested Oliver as a possible reviewer, given his experience with PIDs at HZDR. WP2 will try to have an internal version ready for review sooner than 14th of Feb (as asked by task leader) to ensure the deadline. We have many late deliverables accumulating, any deliverable on time helps a lot.

Concerning the upcoming workshop on FAIR data management (metadata), the questions are being refined. Once they’re ready, 2 e-mails will be sent:

• a first one to facility representatives, including the questions to prepare and asking to nominate someone, by the 11th of Feb, to attend the workshop, someone who will be expected to answer these questions;
• a second one to all, inviting them to attend the workshop.

Then Abigail mentioned the FAIR assessment task, which is due this summer and is a big piece of work (hence item #2 of the agenda). She foresees difficulties publishing self-assessment results because we don’t want to end up comparing facilities with one another and ending up with reluctance to publish. Isabelle agreed to help and discuss this possible issue separately with WP2.

Data policy guidance notes are now ready to be put in the training platform. Similar notes will be produced for DMP guidance.

Finally, Sophie asked WP2’s opinion on the catalogue of FAIR tools for PaN. It was discussed during a WP2 meeting but it was not clear who the audience was and they wondered whether tools like FAIR-aware were not too generic for example for such a catalogue. A separate meeting would help to progress on this, so Sophie will get in touch.
Alun mentioned that training content provided by ETH Zürich was useful for young scientists at PSI.

WP3

WP3 is focused on its upcoming deliverable to demonstrate ICAT and SciCat working with the PaN search API. MAX IV setup is to be used as a demonstrator. The deliverable will also cover the onboarding of a facility’s data catalogue in EOSC, linking to the associated milestone. Andy mentioned that STFC said in another meeting that the ICAT plugin for the PaN search API should be ready by the end of the week.

WP4

The main two tasks for WP4 right now are to update the general architecture with WP3 and WP1 and to write the prototype analysis service deliverable before the end of February. Majid discussed the outline of the deliverable (D4.4) this morning with Anton and it will be on the agenda of Friday’s WP4 meeting. It would be as follows:

• description of the selected pipelines, correlating to the situation at facilities now,
• description of a containerised application,
• case of an OpenStack / Kubernetes deployment,
• one example using VISA.

The aim of the deliverable is not to provide 1 standard solution but rather recognise the diversity of the situation and describe some of the most interesting possibilities.

Majid proposed to have mixed reviewers between WP3 and WP4 so all three deliverables (architecture + prototype analysis + catalogue) are consistent.

WP5

WP5 received no other comment or question about the training plan (exchanges by email, several reminders were sent). WP5 is now rolling out the training plan and will contact WP leaders to schedule the next WS and identify their needs.

New material from Soleil was uploaded to the platform. ExPaNDS/PaNOSC agreed on a single domain name: pan-training.eu. It is redirecting to the HZDR page for now, the new landing page agreed with PaNOSC will soon be up.

WP5 encouraged participants to send their training materials to them using the wp5@expands.eu address.

In terms of development, Oliver and Antoine are replacing the use of Google maps with an open source alternative: open layers.

With the mid-term recommendation to keep connected to other training initiatives in mind, Sophie asked the status of the LEAPS WG on training. Ana mentioned it had been on stand-by for a while but that activities were starting again.

WP6

The use case interviews packed into 1 min videos are now ready, there are 7 in total. Isabelle thanked the PEB for the feedback received, in particular Uwe. Now WP6 is working on the data management plan on the back of those use cases, showing the actual changes it triggered at Diamond, up to the actual publication of the results. The identified users are also users of other facilities so Isabelle will involve them in a second phase.

As planned in the amended grant agreement, the next WP6 webinar will be on tomography with the UCL group. The 2nd one will be on heritage science and the Mary Rose. The third upcoming event is a career-focused webinar to showcase data science careers with gender-balanced role models.

Isabelle also reminded the PEB about the RDA call for abstracts for the hybrid 19th RDA plenary in June 2022 and encouraged us to think of a possible session.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Anton B., Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy, Olaf-Peter, Andrey, Giuseppe, Darren, Brigitte

Introduction

This extended PEB was planned to get all partners around the table to discuss expectations and issues for the last year of the project. The contribution of each facility to our main objectives, for which we defined explicit targets after our mid-term review, was prepared ahead of the meeting and filled in the following document: 2022-01-18 Extended PEB part I - objectives.

Objective 1: 10 FAIR-related actions

For most partners, the first FAIR-related action induced by ExPaNDS is the data policy update, closely followed by the implementation of PIDs for data. DMPs are a bit further down the line, which is a good indication of the maturity of data management planning in our communities. To evaluate if by the end of ExPaNDS we will have reached our objective of more FAIR data at PaN RIs, WP2 has a final task on self-FAIR-assessment, see item 7 of the agenda.

Objective 2: (meta)data catalogues at 65%

WP3 has been coordinating the progress to expose our data, via the PaN search API as well as via the OAI-PMH. Alun sees some good progress which is already materialising for the OAI-PMH and will in the final year for the rest.

The registration of facility open data catalogues in the EOSC marketplace directly is not an objective for all facilities, it will be encouraged but not necessarily expected, as long as the data is exposed by one of the other ways.

Objective 3: 6 data analysis pipelines

The first data analysis pipeline to be made available in EOSC will be CrystFEL, which will also serve as a prototype for containerised workflows. The 1-2 following candidates will be identified, to know which facility will be, in the end, delivering which reference analysis pipeline. The same is true for Jupyter workflows, the 3-4 candidates need to be explicitly defined, although these are already mostly “cloud-ready”. Anton will add this to the agenda of the next WP4 meeting.

One possible issue that we should not underestimate is the “paperwork” for EOSC onboarding. Giuseppe offered to set up a working group on onboarding so that we all know how to do it and make sure we offer “onboardable” services.

Objective 4: Training material in the catalogue

To adapt to remote access, we observe that beamline scientists are changing their habits and looking for more sustainable ways of delivering training to their users, recording videos e.g. and in general, producing material to be reused and not tailored for one visit, as it was the case before. This represents a good opportunity for us to offer them the PaN training platforms.

This is not the core objective of WP5 which is to roll out the training plan already defined for all ExPaNDS-related training content. However this represents a chance to make this great tool sustainable after the project ends. All facilities are thus encouraged to mimic Soleil and HZDR’s process to get the BL scientists on board by advertising the platform to them directly, including when not an official partner in WP5.

Objective 5: 5 members in the EOSC association

4 facilities are already members of the EOSC association and 2 more are planning to apply, meaning our objective should be reached before the end of ExPaNDS.

Strategy for validation of metadata standards and FAIR assessment

Brian took the opportunity of the extended PEB to present WP2’s strategy for its final year because it will need all facilities participation. In particular, 2 workshops will be planned. A first one on the 1st of March will focus on the update of the data management framework, including more links to metadata schemas. The second will be to present and discuss the self FAIR assessment process, around the end of May / early June.

Brian is asking for a nominated representative at each facility to be the prime contact for WP2 to:

• prepare the workshop on data management,
• supervise/coordinate the FAIR self-assessment process at each facility.

This representative should be familiar with the data management process at his/her facility and be connected enough to seek the right person internally for specific answers.

Status quo per WP

AOB

MAX IV and HZB both have a motivated ExPaNDS team and are satisfied with the project. Elettra’s only concern is that their BL scientists are not yet all convinced about FAIR.

Soleil’s learning curve on cloud infrastructure is steep but Majid was positive about the progress achieved and very thankful for the help of the community experts, especially Michael Schuh at DESY. He asked whether external people could be invited to the WP2 workshop on FAIR assessment because Françoise Genova contacted Soleil to discuss this particular topic at the French level. Brian prefers to keep this specific workshop internal, but is happy to talk to Françoise in parallel to see what else we can offer.

Valentina informed us she will be leaving PSI and ExPaNDS at the end of February. All thanked her for a great collaboration and wished all the best for the future.

🙋 Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Anton, Majid, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Andy, Paul

Introduction

PaNOSC meeting in Copenhagen

The PaNOSC meeting in Copenhagen took place on the 29th and 30th of November. Among the topics discussed, Sophie mentioned the interest of PaNOSC facilities in the upcoming FAIR assessment work of WP2. PaNOSC facilities are looking at having their catalogues certified by CoreTrustSeal, which Brian is considering as well, using FAIRsFAIR’s work on combining FAIR and CoreTrustSeal in the frame of the FAIR assessment, as it is wider than F-UJI, focusing on the process rather than only on the data.

The VISA and PaN search API sustainability and governance are going to be important topics for next year. A follow-up project for FAIR for PaN in Horizon Europe was not really discussed as the LEAPS chairs have volunteered to work on it during the last general assembly.

An issue was raised on the workflow feature that is overlapping between pan-training and pan-learning platforms, which will need to be addressed in the frame of WP5. An issue in GitHub will be added.

Another common issue we should address between both projects is the experience of onboarding services to EOSC, that several facilities are facing individually for now. WP1 will follow-up.

About AAI, the Umbrella IdP will soon disappear for the institutions IdP. The Umbrella organisation will from now manage the authorisation groups and the EduGAIN proxy, which is compatible to EOSC AAI. A new Umbrella chair is soon to be elected, for now Jean-François is our contact point.

Finally, the plan is still to have an all-hands meeting for both projects in April/May, that will be hybrid. The last annual meeting will then happen again in Oct/Nov 2022.

Workshop on FAIR metadata

WP2 with the help of WP6 is organising a metadata workshop on the 2nd of March 2022 from 10:00 to 13:00 CET about the final recommendations for FAIR Photon and Neutron data management. The goal is to set the scene and synthesise the work on metadata, also in relationship with WP3 (search API and OAI-PMH) and WP4 (provenance). As the feedback from both WPs and partner facilities is very important for this task, WP2 will ask for people to be nominated in each WP and from each facility in an upcoming e-mail. Questions will also be sent in advance to prepare the workshop.

The same principle will be applied for the FAIR assessment task so Brian would like to present both strategies at the upcoming extended PEB to be planned in January. Sophie will add it to the agenda.

Risk analysis update

Following the update of the risk analysis by WP1, Sophie asked the WP leaders to check their respective risks and provide feedback:

• Anton suggested adding a risk for possible loopholes between WP3 and WP4 for the technical coordinator.
• Abigail suggested resolving the risk on DMPs not being able to cope with the diversity of instruments because the approach taken in the recently published deliverable covers this.
• Ana asked to revise the text on the mitigation actions for the risk of the input training material being late: it’s not regular meetings but rather individual SCRUM-like brainstorming sessions that are planned.
• Paul noted that the risk on personnel is still relevant, as he saw during the catalogue gap analysis workshop this morning. With the upcoming interim report we will have an updated view of the resources available and check what can be achieved during the last year. Needed refocus, redistribution or subcontracting are options that will be studied.

The register will be updated accordingly.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie mentioned she plans to have the extended PEB on the 18th of Jan. Invitations and agenda will be shared before the holidays. Please note there will be no PEB on the 4th of Jan.

WP2

The DMP deliverable is now delivered and published. The DMP implementation is still to be defined in the remaining year adding also more context on how each piece of information will be used further along the RDM process. Brian underlined that the DMP will not sit on a shelf but will be used at several stages, which should be highlighted and explained.

Uwe also noted that users often come for a series of experiments, so a first DMP can be used afterwards as a basis for following proposals. This can also be highlighted / exploited to pre-fill the DMP template.
At HZDR for example, only ~50% of users are first-comers. It would be interesting to know if this statistic is similar at other facilities.

WP3

The catalogue gap assessment workshop preparation highlighted common areas of concern that WP3 can now focus on in the frame of tasks 3.4 and 3.5. The actual workshop happened this morning with all facilities represented.

Alun also mentioned the upcoming PaN search API scoring workshop to take place on Wed, 15th next week.

WP5

Abigail mentioned having a closed area per facility in the training platform was seen as an advantage for adoption, in the case of ISIS, when training requirements were discussed earlier in the project. The development of the platform focuses on openness to meet the EC call objectives. However, with Umbrella and its group management it could be in theory possible. It was noted that if the metadata was public, restricted access content could still be published in the platform, linking to a restricted access area.

WP6

Kat reported that Sophie has a 3 min “poster slam” at the BESSY@HZB user meeting this Thursday on FAIR and open data for national photon and neutron facilities in Europe.

An abstract was prepared with PaNOSC and submitted for ESOF 2022 on the benefits of open science in health. The application can be found in SharePoint.

Kat is also finalising the librarian symposium report taking Brian and Abigail’s feedback into account, with follow-up questions and a finalisation planned before Christmas.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Anton, Majid, Ana, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy, Paul

Introduction

To prepare for the upcoming PaNOSC workshop, Patrick and Sophie collected feedback from WP3 and WP4. In addition, Brian asked to mention future work in WP2 that could be taken up by PaNOSC facilities too (e.g. FAIR assessment).

During the last CB meeting, several facilities representatives could not attend and were represented by PEB members (Diamond, PSI, UKRI). In addition to the PEB members that already officially have the two hats, the CB looked very much like the PEB. Patrick and Sophie raised the concern that it was, in this case, not as useful as it should be and that we were missing an opportunity to involve senior management.

Andy mentioned a new LEAPS general assembly started tomorrow. Gaston added the topic of data strategy in the agenda, picking up on the survey Andy initiated on our projects outcomes, and gathering further commitment from LEAPS facilities. Patrick emphasised that we now needed to be local relays for this strategy to take shape, giving the example of the LEAPS@DESY monthly meetings.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie mentioned the working group in charge of the technical architecture update was now settled, with a first meeting organised by Marta in the planning. Anton noted we should use this opportunity to watch for any missing hook between data catalogue and data analysis.
Members of this working group are: Patrick, Paul, Sophie, Marta, Giuseppe, Brian, Carlo and Majid.

WP2

Brian confirmed the DMP deliverable’s review was now finalised and that it only needed the final formatting and english-related edits before being published.

Nicolas is kicking off the second phase of the work on data management.

Brian also informed the PEB that the presentation from HMC (HZB) on FAIR assessment of instruments was very interesting input for the upcoming work in our own task. Recordings will be made available.

Finally, Abigail reported that following the update of the training plan with WP5, training material was discussed during the WP2 last monthly meeting. In particular, possible training material on DMPs is envisaged, in addition to the deliverable.

WP3

In terms of resources for WP3, Brian mentioned Alejandra would be more involved again in the WP tasks. Nicolas added that a new person was hired at ALBA as MIS head, Beatriz. She will also be involved in WP3 tasks.

Sophie mentioned WP3 was working on the important upcoming data catalogue release due in February 2022, which will contain a module for the PaN search API including the implementation of PaNET in SciCat and Icat.

WP4

Anton reported on the ongoing work to document the jupyter workflows, with the objective to have a how-to manual to easily repeat the procedure of making notebooks portable.

Work on containerisation of non-jupyter workflows is also ongoing, mainly by Silvan and Michael at DESY. Again, this will also result in a how-to manual for reproducibility.

Anton also reported that PaNOSC (in particular Jamie) had been very constructive with VISA, which enabled good progress at both DESY and ALBA sites on testing out the analysis platform.

Several of our facilities are registering to the EOSC (already registered are: DESY, STFC, PSI and EGI). Uwe mentioned an issue with the EOSC AAI that HZDR had to solve, involving groups and authorisation for specific attributes to reveal to the EOSC AAI proxy. He will get in touch with Jean-François in PaNOSC for support. Exchange of experience (good and less good) on EOSC onboarding should be encouraged in any case.

WP5

Ana reported progress on updating the training plan and asked for a particular attention to the next workshops.

During the last WP5 meeting, the definition of the process to transfer the training material to WP5 was discussed, as well as the level of ‘maturity’ it should have. This will depend on the WPs, a first tendency would be that WP2 and WP3 will provide finalised and ready-to-publish content, whereas WP4 will probably provide raw material that WP5 will then rework and format.

On the practical level, Ana mentioned the possibility to repurpose wp5@expands.eu to share raw content with WP5 on the one side, and encouraged people to directly add ready-to-use material themselves in the platform on the other.

WP6

Brian is checking the final version of the librarian symposium report which will then be ready to go. Isabelle also reported the upcoming 1-min-videos are progressing well, Kat will circulate a “story-line” to WP leaders in the coming days for input and approval.

About the use cases in general, Isabelle continues to engage with the user ambassadors, discuss with Anton on a possible use of the reference datasets and see to include as well user representatives at the country level. More on this at next PEB.

AOB

Abigail noted that facilities annual reports lacked information on data! Isabelle agreed to bring this to the attention of the heads of comms during a next meeting with them.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Anton L., Majid, Ana, Antoine, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

A new Technical Coordinator

Patrick announced we had found a new Technical Coordinator to replace Daniel. His name is Paul Millar, he is working at DESY in Sophie and Patrick’s group. He has a PhD in plasma physics and a solid experience in data management for high-energy physics. He’s also much involved in EU projects (e.g. ESCAPE). He’s not from the field of photon science but is very interested and quick to learn.

He will be introduced in the upcoming Collaboration Board meeting next week. Sophie and Kat will add him to mailing lists, SharePoint and other project’s tools.

Extended PEB #2 for achievements and resources per facility

With the last year of the project approaching, Sophie suggested we repeat the experience of an “extended PEB” where instead of the WPs, each partner facility would report on their progress and objectives until the end of the project. It would also be timely with the upcoming financial report that is due to start March 1st covering the whole 30 first months of ExPaNDS. No one objected, so Sophie will plan this for January.

Status quo per WP

WP1

During our mid-term review, we were asked to update the technical architecture for the project. Marta suggested steering a dedicated working group with WP3 and WP4 representatives to do so with EGI, the TC and the PC. Majid volunteered for WP4 and Alun will suggest someone for WP3. Alun asked to make sure PaNOSC was well represented too, to avoid holes in the architecture, be it through EGI, or directly with a participating member from PaNOSC (Jamie as TC?).

Sophie participated last week in the FAIR task force meeting of the INFRA-EOSC-5 projects which was dedicated to sustainability. FAIRsFAIR is ending in February 2022 already so they are very much focusing on it now. They are e.g. doing 1-page documents to explain for each of their key outputs the exact sustainability plan. It looked like a good practice that Sophie will experiment with the PaNET ontology and then submit to Valentina and WP3. Sophie briefly presented our own sustainability plans to the task force which was very positive about the approach.

It was also mentioned that it would be interesting / important to have a sustainable Zenodo community for all PaN projects outputs (past and future). Valentina was considering this for LEAPS already and will come back to the group on this topic.

WP2

Brian reported good feedback on the workshop on PIDs on the 22nd October, that will be used in the future deliverable.

The deliverable on DMPs is finalised and was submitted for internal review last week. Majid, Sophie and Jonathan from PaNOSC agreed to review it; it should then be ready to be published by the end of November as planned. There is still some work to do on DMPs and this task will continue with a final deliverable due in Nov. 2022.

Brian reminded us that next Monday HZB (HMC) will present how they assessed the FAIRness of an instrument at BESSY.

Abigail has an interview with FAIRsFAIR tomorrow about our data policy updates, with a bit of a different focus than the last story. She will let us know when it is published so Kat can include it in the newsfeed of expands.eu.

As suggested by Sophie, Abigail added an item to address the KPIs during the monthly WP2 meetings from now on.

WP3

Tasks 3.4 and 3.5 are now kicked-off and well taken over by MAX IV and HZB. Rolf sent to all facilities the request to review their status towards federated metadata catalogues, using the questions from the roadmap. A workshop will follow to discuss progress, issues and where WP3 can help.

Alun, Anton L., Patrick and Sophie also had a progress report meeting for WP3 last week, which Sophie will use to provide the achievements and next steps for each task.

Brian added Matthew arrived at STFC to replace Stuart who left WP3.

WP4

The testing framework is still pending but has been reviewed internally by Krisztian whose comments will be addressed now along with Patrick’s review.

Majid reported good progress on the analysis service prototype developed by SOLEIL. The Openstack infrastructure is now launched and Eric is working regularly with Jamie on the installation of VISA in addition to Jupyter services. The plan is to use this instance in the future at SOLEIL, integrated as the operational solution offered to users.

All were very happy to welcome Majid again in our PEBs.

WP5

Content continues to be added to the training platform (promotional video, STARS workflow, WP3 material, etc.). Ana also suggested adding the recent workshops recordings and material: PID workshop, librarian symposium, PaN EOSC symposium.

On the progress of the platform’s development, Antoine reported that the user analytics are now GDPR-compliant and in place. The PaNET ontology is now integrated to help users fill PaN techniques in the relevant metadata fields. Giuseppe also implemented EGI check-in as a possible access provider. Next step will be to integrate Umbrella (EduTeams), which will be done by HZDR.

Ana will send around the updated training plan to all WPs for possible changes and updates. The 3rd WP5 workshop content and timeline will also be discussed during the next meeting.

WP6

Isabelle noted we should be careful with the dissemination of our outputs in two many platforms: Zenodo, EU portal, website, training platform, … This can become tricky especially for monitoring purposes. Sophie takes the comment and will follow-up.

Isabelle reported the librarian symposium report would be ready for review this week. 2 use cases are also available and a third is underway. With the amendment accepted, Isabelle launched the 6 1-minute videos, for which the outline will circulate to WP1 and WP2 also this week.

The response rate on the metrics questionnaire is in the end around only 50% which makes it difficult to use. Isabelle asked the missing facilities (Elettra, PSI, HZB, HZDR, ISIS) to let her know why they can’t provide these statistics, to try and see what can be arranged. Abigail asked whether the data would be made accessible to all partners afterall, which was not yet decided since some facilities would on the contrary prefer if only aggregated figures were shared.

Patrick added we agreed to pay for a 3-pages article on ExPaNDS to be published in the journal EU research.

AOB

Valentina confirmed after talking to Alun that it was worth updating the risk registry for ExPaNDS. She will send her suggestions to Sophie and distribute this to WP leaders to prepare for a joint meeting with Jordi to align with his own update process for PaNOSC.

Abigail mentioned FAIRsFAIR published a white paper following the synchronisation task forces they carried out all along their project. It is open for comments until the 14th of November.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Anton L., Anton B., Ana, Antoine, Kat, Andy

Introduction

This 30 minutes PEB was used as a means of sharing the PEB's impressions of the 2nd PaN EOSC symposium that had just taken place.

Feedback on 2nd PaN EOSC symposium

Out of a total of 156 registrants, we had 118 attendees. PaNOSC’s PO was there and wrote to Andy afterwards that he had found the symposium very good, especially the conversation at the end, a format he encouraged. Otherwise the attendees were mostly from our facilities, with a few additions reached thanks to ESUO.

All agreed the talks were good and it was appreciated to see science cases. The use cases speakers may have felt a bit rushed, with sometimes no time at all for questions, which can be frustrating.

The interesting concept of “non-specialist” users from Frank’s talk was worth noting. These are users not directly from the community who created the data but well-known nonetheless. It may be an interesting middle layer between principal users and completely unknown users we could focus more on and better describe. In this particular case, it was specific to MX and PDB but could still apply to other domains too.

The influence of ExPaNDS / PaNOSC on the use cases presented was not always clear enough, sometimes it could feel as if we only added our branding. In particular, what Frank’s use case described happened quite early on for us, so it didn’t directly benefit from the projects. On the contrary, we benefited from it, for it showcased the need for FAIR data and pointed to current weaknesses at our facilities.

Then we discussed an important point on one of Robert’s statements that “all data are not equal”.

If we agree that the “F” and the “A” must always be there, at least for the PI and for the facility itself, then why apply the “I” and “R” only to a subset of selected data? Robert’s point was that we don’t have nor the money nor the time to make all data FAIR.

But if only the PI - at best - knows his data and would be able to reinterpret / verify / repurpose it later on, then it might not be worth keeping this data in the first place, as the whole thing is very fragile in the long term. This does not comply with what we want to achieve, in particular if we consider that the data is the responsibility of the facility (which is not the case for all our facilities).

What we should aim instead is making the “I” and the “R” as automated as possible, so the data produced at our facilities is FAIR by design, regardless of its supposed value. For the “F” and the “A”, as was already mentioned in a previous PEB, we would then need to make efforts on curation and quality of service in storage (number of copies and quality of the storage itself as a function of the reproducibility of data, like what is done in WLCG), which is where costs can be saved.

Two things to be noted however, a 100% automation is, to date, not realistic and historically in PaN, the cost of storing data has been much lower than the cost of people, so until now, we’ve kept everything without too much second thought. This might change in the future, at least for synchrotrons, with the increase of brilliance, the upgrade of detectors and the increase in raw material costs.

Finally, it was noted that there are very few projects in PaN to better exploit existing data. For now, it’s not the funding model (notably because facilities are not the funders) and there’s more appeal to make new experiments, e.g. because techniques evolve. But in a more constrained context, there would probably be a lot to gain from reusing existing data. And of course FAIR and open data create these opportunities.
Anton made a parallel with the oil industry: when the barrel prices are low, there is no new exploration, so old data is analysed with lots of interest. When the prices go up, new explorations become profitable again and old data is forgotten. Maybe a similar constraint can appear for PaN which will encourage us to exploit more what is already available.

There are already examples of data that are published only for re-use: the ESRF’s human organ program and ESA’s Copernicus data.

Status quo per WP

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Abigail, Alun, Anton L., Anton B., Ana, Uwe, Isabelle

Introduction

Amendment to the grant agreement #2

The second amendment WP6 and WP1 have been working on has been submitted last Friday to the Commission for approval. If accepted, the two dedicated European user meetings focused on ExPaNDS will be replaced by the following deliverables:

• D6.21 : Promotional video [M21]
  ExPaNDS promotional video introducing the grant with senior figures emphasising the importance of the work


• D6.22 : Librarian symposium report [M26]
  Librarian and data managers symposium to stimulate debate and consensus on licences for data, the measure of FAIR principles within facilities etc.


• D6.23 : User interviews [M28]
  Six ‘one-minute’ user interviews packaged for social media and presenting the benefits from all key stakeholders


• D6.24 : Senior level engagement [M34]
  Short video series to encapsulate senior level engagement at PaN facilities in open science


• D6.25 : PaN communities use cases [M40]
  Develop a series of 6 use cases in collaboration with all WPs linked to 6 webinars in key topics based areas of the PaN community

The associated milestone (MS26 Dedicated European User Meeting) will be renamed as MS26 Ambassador engagement from all facilities user community.

Use cases to be presented at the PaN EOSC symposium

The selection of use cases to be presented for ExPaNDS at the PaN EOSC symposium was finalised and will consist of:

• the presentation of a tomography case study from Diamond where the publication and the data analysis workflow are open access but not the data - see associated paper
• DOI, FAIR, an MX COVID-19 use case, from Diamond too
• HZDR’s TELBE data analysis workflow and the PaN training platform UX

Isabelle and Ana confirmed all speakers had been formally invited and had confirmed their contribution. Slides are being prepared.

HZDR is now (very close to) being harvested by B2FIND. It was suggested that if the data search on B2FIND could be added in the workflow presented by the HZDR scientist, it would make a good link to WP3 work too.

Status quo per WP

WP1

The next CB meeting (collaboration board, with all ExPaNDS members representatives) is planned for the 17th of November at 2pm CET. Patrick invited the PEB to suggest topics to be raised at the CB level if needed.

In addition to finalising the amendment, Sophie and Patrick met with WP2 leads and co-lead to prepare the update of the progress report for WP2. Next in line will be WP3 that Sophie will start planning this week.

WP2

Abigail reported that following the progress report discussions, it had been decided not to publish the full write-up of the consultation process for the data policy framework, as each individual facility hadn’t sent their explicit consent. It will be kept as an internal project document, in SharePoint. The reference to this supplementary document will be amended in the data policy framework deliverable itself asap.

On the DMP task, Heike is getting ready to have a reviewable version of the upcoming deliverable “DMPs for Photon and Neutron RIs” by the end of October. A useful meeting last week made sure the two simultaneous deliverables (the one from ExPaNDS and the one from PaNOSC), both due at the end of November, were well complementary.

To kick-off the update of the recommendations for FAIR Photon and Neutron Data Management, Nicolas is for the moment still trying to find a date to accommodate most contributors.

Vasily and Kat finalised the organisation of the second workshop on PIDs on the 22nd of October. The programme is available here and the registration link here.

Abigail and Brian also started the discussions on the FAIR assessment task and in particular the opportunity to use F-UJI, a tool developed by FAIRsFAIR to assess the FAIRness of datasets. However in ExPaNDS, we mostly want to focus on the FAIRness of the data creation process itself (the experiment) and not so much the end-result (the dataset). On this topic, HMC will be presenting their experience with FAIR assessment of beamlines to both ExPaNDS and PaNOSC interessees on the 15th of November 2021. Invitations will be issued soon to all WPs.

WP3

Anton L. is now the interim co-lead of WP3, in replacement of Sylvie. By January 2022, a more permanent representative will be appointed by Diamond. Isabelle added that an internal Diamond stakeholders meeting was scheduled in October to discuss resources.

The status of HZDR towards an OAI-PMH reachable endpoint for its metadata catalogue was updated.

WP4

The testing framework deliverable is in its final stages, it should be delivered before next PEB.

Patrick reported preparation works continuing for the ExPaNDS contribution to the EOSC-Synergy workshop at the EGI conference next Tuesday.

Anton reported he had been busy working on the DESY answer to the LEAPS questionnaire, which raised awareness on the concrete organisational and resources needs to sustain the outcomes of our project.

WP5

Since the last PEB, the demonstrator for e-learning platforms was published. There were also further enhancements to the platform: adding a privacy policy, adding curators, white-listing known email address domains for automatic registration (@cells.es, @desy.de, @esrf.fr, etc.). Antoine and Oliver are also working on analytics (to monitor the number of visitors e.g.) but first need to solve GDPR-related issues.

Uwe and Ana reminded us that the development is now progressing well, so we need to focus on the content.

WP6

To follow-up on the librarian and data managers symposium last week, WP6 sent around a survey to participants, which results will be used for a short report on the event.

Isabelle reported the promotional video will be launched next week on social media.

The development of a use case for arts and humanities is progressing, with a foreseeable webinar in the first quarter of 2022. The head of conservation at the Mary Rose Trust would be contributing. Contact is maintained with the user ambassadors from all Europe to continue developing further use cases.

A Diamond user is investigating the Figlinq tool to judge its usefulness for the community and will be presenting his conclusions in an event WP6 will facilitate.

As hinted during the last PEB, Isabelle confirmed we would have a speaking opportunity for ExPaNDS at the SXNS 2022 conference dinner in January.

In terms of large international conferences, WP6 secured a slot at a soft X-ray community conference next summer in Oxford. There are also ongoing talks about a joint ExPaNDS - lightsources.org joint event on big data at the SRI 2022 in Hamburg. And third, WP6 is working on extending and presenting the demo made at our mid-term review at the 2022 Lung Development, Injury and Repair conference (GRS).

Isabelle is also aiming at publishing some metrics, gathered thanks to the earlier survey, on Twitter, for the upcoming World Science Day of the United Nations (10/11/2021).

AOB

Abigail mentioned the SciDataCon event starting next week.

Uwe reminded all to register as EOSC providers.

🙋 Sophie, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Silvia, Anton L., Anton B., Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Feedback on LEAPS general assembly and next steps

Andy and Sophie reported on the LEAPS general assembly on the 17th of Sept. Following the presentation of the main outcomes of ExPaNDS and PaNOSC, three main questions were asked to the LEAPS representatives:

1. which ones of the projects outcomes are you planning to adopt at your facility and at what stage are you?
2. are you interested in a PaN open data commons? and if yes,
1. would you rather have a decentralised system: all centres curating their data and only the central federated search API being maintained by the community
2. or a centralised system: 1 PaN data management entity dealing with all the individual centres open data
3. or a hybrid system: smaller centres confide their open data to other PaN centres who already curate hundreds of PB and have an open data portal
3. should we write a strategy paper on data for LEAPS?

The questionnaire and associated cost estimates as they were sent to LEAPS GA are attached in the appendix of these minutes. An answer is expected by this Friday.

Next step is for Andy and Patrick to present the engagement of LEAPS facilities in the sustainability of our projects outcomes based on the replies received, at the LEAPS plenary on the 21st of October. This will hopefully be echoed by both LEAPS and LENS representatives at our PaN EOSC symposium on the 26th of October.

A discussion followed on financial plans already decided for, on parallel data management fundings at other levels, the concern that this could lead to big decisions to be taken on short notice. But overall it was seen as very positive that this led to important internal discussions at our facilities.

On the open data commons topic, there’s a tendency to say the hybrid solution seems the most promising. Not all facilities would agree on a central storage, especially those who already built a data management infrastructure. But others will definitely be interested in having at least their published open data stored and curated, without having to start from scratch.

It was also raised that in the PaN community, we think about data storage, but not enough about data curation. Selecting which data to store is very important and there is yet no consensus / guideline in the community. For example, weighing the reproducibility of an experiment itself vs. keeping the data stored forever could be evaluated. Some experiments are more reproducible / expensive than others.

Status quo per WP

WP2

Tasks organisation was discussed during the last WP2 monthly meeting. In particular, Nicolas is kicking off the work on data management.

Brian contributed to the INFRA-EOSC-5 projects workshop on Policies at the OSFair. The session was recorded and is available here.

WP3

Following the last monthly management meeting with task leaders, tasks 3.4 and 3.5 are to be kicked-off tomorrow, including discussions on the interactions between those two.

HZDR discussed with B2FIND for the harvesting of their catalogue, which is in progress.

Note: the status of each facility is monitored here in GitHub - any updates welcome.

WP4

The workplan is now picking up after a summer slowdown:

• onboarding existing services to EOSC,
• connecting the same services to the federated PaN search portal under development by PaNOSC,
• making analysis SW portable (jupyter and non-jupyter),
• exploring VISA,
• documenting everything.

Abigail mentioned an interesting discussion at STFC concerning the testing of services once they are registered in EOSC. It would be interesting to include this in the ongoing deliverable on the testing framework. This will be discussed with Zdenek, Anton, Franz and the rest of WP4.

Sophie also added that EOSC-Synergy offered us to present ExPaNDS as a use case for their SQAaaS framework during this EGI conference workshop. Talks are ongoing with Zdenek and Michael to see what we can present, in the spirit of the mid-term review demo. There is a meeting tomorrow morning.

WP5

The deliverable on the e-learning platform is under final review by Patrick and Kat. It will then be delivered to the EC.

Material on ontologies will soon be added to the catalogue, thanks to Sylvie.

Recent enhancements to the training catalogue:

• automatic upload,
• setup webservices on Moodle to be able to scrap the content from the e-learning platform courses metadata back to the catalogue,
• adding workflows from SOLEIL and HZDR from the reference datasets (in progress) + making them more visual,
• UmbrellaID implementation being tested by Giuseppe at EGI, feedback for next meeting at the end of Oct.,
• normalisation and curation of metadata: compiling ideas now.

HZDR is looking for a speaker for a use case lightning talk at the symposium, the previous speaker foreseen is unfortunately not available that day.

Uwe also invited other WPs to add workflows to the platform (see example here), starting with the reference datasets but also including cross-WP work.

WP6

The librarian symposium is now upcoming this Thursday. It has 63 registrants at this stage. It was well cascaded at each facility, notably thanks to European heads of comms meeting.

Kat also secured a 10 minutes slot for ExPaNDS to present at the HZB user meeting on the 9th of Dec. The topic / presenter will be discussed with Patrick. Discussions are also ongoing for a possible talk at the SXNS 2022 in January in Lund.

AOB

All thanked Sylvie for the great collaboration.

Sophie informed the PEB about the PaNOSC Copenhagen workshop planned for 29-30/11/2021 to discuss, face-to-face, the remaining period objectives among PaNOSC WP leaders. Sophie and Patrick will be “representing” ExPaNDS there and will ask for input in due time.

APPENDIX

LEAPS Data Strategy – Questions to LEAPS General Assembly

Introduction

The outcomes and future of the two EOSC projects PaNOSC and ExPaNDS were presented at the LEAPS GA on 17/9/2021. A copy of the presentation can be found here. The two projects include almost all members of LEAPS and LENS and therefore the future of the two projects depends on LEAPS and LENS adopting the outcomes of these projects. The presenters posed three questions concerning the adoption of the outcomes and the future data strategy of LEAPS. The LEAPS AG requested some time to reflect on the answers and to have a summary of the costs involved. This document briefly summarises the questions and presents an estimate of the costs involved in adopting the solutions as requested. Note: the costs of sustaining the solutions over the long term costs are not included in these estimates (see WP7 of PaNOSC for an estimate of these costs).

The answers from the GA will be presented at the Plenary session and discussed at the PaNOSC and ExPaNDS Symposium in October.

Adopting the PaNOSC and ExPaNDS outcomes

The following table give figures estimating the actions and effort required to implement the outcomes of PaNOSC and ExPaNDS. The time estimates are approximate based on the assumption that facilities build on existing solutions developed by PaNOSC and ExPaNDS and do not start from scratch. The figures are approximations and will vary from site to site depending on local resources available and priorities.

Almost all the outcomes require that facilities have a Data Manager dedicated to scientific data management, this is still not the case at many facilities which makes the adoption of the outcomes more difficult.

The following abbreviations have been used: DM = Data Manager, DP = Data Policy, PM = Person Months, UO = User Office

Outcome	Specific Actions	Resources to adopt Outcome	Comments
1. FAIR data policy	Adopt or modify existing data policies to be FAIR.	2 PMs of a Data Manager + Consultation with Scientists + Management	Management support to prepare and present DP to governing bodies.
2. Data Management Plans (DMPs)	Implement DMPs for users based on outcomes of PaNOSC + ExPaNDS.	6 PMs of a Data Manager	Implement DMP solution and integrate it into the UO workflow.
3. FAIR assessment and common PID framework	Implement Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for data. Setup a WG to assess FAIRness of data.	12 PMs of a Data Manager	Setup a contract with Datacite and implement a data repository for registering data. This assumes adopting one the existing data repositories + having access to an infrastructure for archiving data.
4. Standardised metadata (Nexus/HDF5, PaN ontologies)	Adopt Nexus/HDF5 and produce data following the Nexus conventions.	12 PMs of a controls engineer. 2 PMs per technique for data scientists.	Requires adding support for Nexus/HDF5 to the control system
5. Federated search API for PaN data catalogues	Implement the PaNOSC search API as a service for the local data repository.	6 PMs of a Data Manager for a non-standard catalogue. 2 PMs of a Data Manager for one of the supported catalogues.	Need to implement the search API if the local repository is not a standard one.
6. Open Data portal for searching + downloading data	Implement a metadata catalogue and data repository to upload, search and download open data.	24 PMs of a Data Manager + 12 PMs of an IT infrastructure engineer. 10-20 k€/PB/y of archived data. (Amazon cold storage costs 12 k€/PB/y but does not include the local manpower required to integrate AWS in the local infrastructure.)	Need to adapt an existing solution locally. Cost for archiving is a rough estimate for long term storage.
7. Community AAI UmbrellaId	Implement the PaN community AAI UmbrellaId based on eduTEAMS.	6 PMs of an IT engineer. 1 PM per new data service.	Implement the latest version of UmbrellaId locally for data services.
8. JupyterLab notebooks and HDF5/NeXus files visualisation	Implement a Jupyterlab instance for remote data viewing and interactive analysis.	6 PMs of a software engineer and 6 PMs of an IT infrastructure engineer.	PaNOSC has packaged jupyterlab for slurm and developed h5web for viewing HDF5.
9. Remote data analysis with VISA + data analysis pipelines	Implement the VISA remote analysis service.	12 PMs of an IT infrastructure engineer and 6 PMs of a Data Manager.
10. Simulation software for simulating experimental data (SIMEX)	Adopt and install the SIMEX simulation software.	6 PMs of a software engineer.
11. PaN-learning platform (pan-learning.org + pan-training.org)	Use and upload new training material to the PaN-learning platform.	1 PM of a trainer to prepare training material per new topic.

It would be useful to know what the state of the outcomes are at your facility :

• Yes, already adopted (Y)
• Not Planning to be adopted (N)
• In progress of being adopted (WIP)
• Planned to be adopted (P)
• Under evaluation (U)

Q1: LEAPS GA members are requested to fill out the table below.

Facility	FAIR Data Policy	DMPs	DOIs	Nexus HDF5	Search API	Open Data Portal	AAI	Jupyter Lab	VISA	SIMEX	PaN training
Your facility

PaN Open Data Commons

The visibility and impact of data from the LEAPS facilities could be greatly enhanced by exposing them via a common portal which can search for data across all facilities. This would make the data easier to find to access (F and A of FAIR) and make them more re-used (R of FAIR). The impact of LEAPS data would be easier to measure which would could lead to more funding for LEAPS thanks to a common branding. It would also contribute to implementing Open Science across the LEAPS facilities. The LEAPS data would be integrated into EOSC through the common portal. This approach is common in biology (ELIXIR), environment (ENVRI), sociology (SSHOC) and astronomy (Virtual Observatory).

The question was posed at the LEAPS GA of 17 September 2021 if the vision of a common portal was shared by the members of the LEAPS GA. Before answering the question, the LEAPS partners requested to have more information on the potential cost of implementing such a portal. Here are some rough estimates for different scenarios:

 Scenario 1 – all LEAPS facilities implement an open data portal locally (see table above for estimates of costs) including the federated search API. In this case the cost involved for a PaN Open Data commons is implementing and maintaining the common portal, linking it to the individual data portals, linking it to the EOSC and maintaining it including making improvements to the search algorithms. The minimum cost additional would be to have a DM working part-time to deploy and maintain the common portal connected to the local portals. The DM would be hired by one of the facilities and paid for collectively by a collaboration contract.

 Scenario 2 – not all LEAPS facilities implement an open data portal locally. Some of them use the common data portal to upload and store data centrally. In this scenario the common cost is higher because it includes the cost for the infrastructure (10-20 k/PB/y of archived data) for storing the common data, 1 IT engineer and 1 DM per year.

 Scenario 3 – would be a hybrid solution between 1 and 2. Some LEAPS facilities would implement an open data portal locally while others would rely on the common portal to upload and store data centrally. In this scenario the cost is lower than 2 because there would be fewer PBs to be archived centrally. It still includes the cost for the infrastructure (10-20 k/PB/y of archived data) for storing the common data, 1 IT engineer and 1 DM per year.

Q2: Does LEAPS GA members share the vision of a common open data portal for open data from LEAPS facilities? Q2-bis: In case the answer to Q2 is yes, which scenario do you prefer?

A LEAPS Open Science and Data Strategy paper

The vision of PaNOSC and ExPaNDS is ambitious and the answers to the above questions could be laid out in more detail in a common LEAPS strategy paper on Open Science and Data. The question to the LEAPS GA is whether there a common agreement to write such a paper and would they contribute to and/or endorse it?

Q3: Do you want a common LEAPS strategy paper on Open Science and Data and would you contribute to it?

🙋 Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Silvia, Ana, Antoine, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

Status of the testing framework

Postponed to next meeting.

PaN training platform: material and workflows

We started by welcoming Antoine, our newest PEB member. He will be from now on the deputy of WP5 lead and working specifically on the training platform for SOLEIL.

The prototype PaN training platform is now at a stage where we should all start adding training material, and encourage beta-tester scientists to use it. The target for this platform covers all PaN community stakeholders: teachers and students will be most interested in the PaN-learning part and all the others in the catalogue of material, events and workflows.

Training on the platform itself is available as a video here. Oliver will also present it during the upcoming librarian symposium on the 30th.

All are invited to report issues in the platform (for example on the consistency of format) in the dedicated GitHub repository issues here.

The metadata standard used for the material is DublinCore and the fields are from RDA’s minimal metadata for training. The data can be retrieved with an API, adding a .json extension to the page. This is described in the “About” section.

“The future of ExPaNDS and PaNOSC” discussed at the LEAPS general assembly (17.09)

Andy and Sophie have a 1h slot at the LEAPS General Assembly on the 17th of September to discuss “the future of ExPaNDS and PaNOSC”. This comes in preparation of the LEAPS plenary presentation on the 21st of October, where Andy and Patrick were invited to present on this topic.

This is useful preparation work also for the PaN EOSC symposium, where LEAPS and LENS representatives were invited to respond to the proposals that will be made.

Programme of the PaN EOSC symposium 2021: 3 use cases needed

In the programme of the virtual PaN EOSC symposium on the 26th of October, after the first part on LEAPS, LENS and sustainability, there is a second part focused on users. We have 3 x 15 minutes to present use cases from the ExPaNDS community. Ideas so far:

• tomography use case Isabelle is building
• training platform with use of workflows

We need to find speakers by the end of Sept. All to bring suggestions for the next PEB.

The amendment in progress with WP6

Our second amendment process with the Commission has now been launched for the user meeting replacement (cf. mid-term review). Isabelle and Sophie are preparing it with the objective to finalise it with Patrick by the end of September.

Status quo per WP

WP2

Brian and Abigail are expecting Patrick’s “go” before publishing the supplementary material linked to the data policy framework consultation.

Heike is on track with the task on DMPs, with good coordination with PaNOSC. It will be the next deliverable for WP2, due end of Nov.

The content for the 2nd workshop on PIDs is being discussed. Kat will follow up with Vasily for the event organisation.

With one deliverable every 3 months from now on in WP2, deliverable leads are to articulate the work so everyone can get organised. This will be discussed at the next WP2 monthly meeting this Thursday.

WP3

Sylvie worked with Antoine to add material in the training catalogue for the PaN ontologies. EGI is still working with Bioportal for their onboarding process to the EOSC.

Recent talks with PaNOSC about the experimental techniques ontology (i.p. XFEL) will lead to the addition of some terms in the ontology. This will be the first “real-life” application of the maintenance process of the ontology and will help refine its governance (cf. issue #21).

Sophie asked about the progress on B2FIND harvesting and Uwe will inquire for HZDR. It may be done “easily” since their data catalogue (RODARE) is using CERN’s Zenodo which has a built-in OAI-PMH interface. Nicolas also mentioned his colleagues in WP3 at ALBA are working on it.

WP4

Uwe suggested applying the principles from WP2-3 to WP4’s reference datasets, for more cross-WP consistency. e.g. identifying if these are FAIR and use the metadata schemas of the ontology and if not, identifying the gaps. To be discussed further with Anton during the next PEB.

Each WP4 facility is registering as a service provider in the EOSC portal. Uwe reported the process was slow at the moment on EOSC’s side, having started it a few weeks ago for HZDR. Abigail discussed this issue with other 5b projects and it is currently complicated for everyone. She offered to share the feedback collected.

WP5

In addition to item #2 of the agenda (see above), WP5 submitted their annual report on training activities (D5.2) and the deliverable about the training platform (D5.4) is currently being reviewed for a delivery by the end of Sept.

WP6

In addition to sorting the amendment, Isabelle reported that Kat applied to international conferences, in particular the Gordon X-ray Science series of conferences where 6 abstracts for posters were submitted.

It was confirmed that the librarian symposium will be recorded, to be then uploaded to the training platform. Isabelle is meeting the heads of comms tomorrow, she will make sure the information on the symposium reaches all facilities librarians and data managers.

The tomography use case continues being developed, including the involvement of ThermoFisher’s specialised reconstruction software.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Anton, Uwe, Kat, Andy

Introduction

First period report accepted by the EC

The report for our first period was accepted by the EC and the interim payment was sent to DESY. Sophie and Bea will now distribute the scheduled transfers in the next few days to the financial contacts.

All-hands meeting #2

Valentina informed us that the LEAPS plenary planned in October turned fully digital. Alun added that XFEL and ESS already know they will not be allowed to travel in foreign countries until the end of the year. Overall, it seems the chances to reach a “critical mass” of people who will be both willing and allowed to travel to PSI in October 2021 are low.

For the first plenary session which will consist of “one-way” talks, it was agreed to prepare a fully digital event, allowing a wide audience. For the internal all-hands sessions however, it was agreed that it didn’t make much sense to switch to a virtual event, which will not enable the interaction that is needed to make it different from our regular Zoom meetings.

What was consequently suggested by the PEB is as follows:

• keep the 26th of October as a virtual plenary event, the EOSC PaN symposium 2021, publicly open and with external speakers;
• postpone the 2 WP-days initially planned on the 27th and 28th of October to late spring / early summer 2022, with the hope of getting this “critical mass” of people willing to come together then. We would in this case aim to meet at PSI as initially envisioned.

Andy agreed on the principle and will relay this suggestion to PaNOSC.

Concerning speakers for the EOSC PaN symposium, it was agreed to invite Dr. Caterina Biscari, the chair of LEAPS, to talk about the sustainability of ExPaNDS and PaNOSC outputs. It is already confirmed that Robert McGreevy (ISIS Director and LENS Chair) will talk about LENS perspective on this topic. Andy suggested using the opportunity of the “The future of ExPaNDS and PaNOSC” (~11:20-11:40h, Oct 21) presentation at the LEAPS plenary to propose a plan and give Catarina the opportunity to reply to it a week later during our EOSC PaN symposium.

Valentina will send an “unofficial invitation” to Catarina and the organisational committee will then produce official invitations, for all speakers.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Yesterday, Patrick and Sophie met with HMC Matter, the branch of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration which deals with photon science. There is an opportunity for collaboration between us on several levels, e.g.:

• sustainability of tools we develop like the ontology or the PaN-training platform;
• input and training on FAIR assessment for beamlines or NeXus format use.

Sophie will put them in contact with Brian to arrange a discussion during one of the next WP2 meetings.

WP2

The updated data policy framework is in its final stages with the review from Alun, Uwe and Sophie received and processed by Brian and Abigail. The consultation was a very interesting exercise that is well captured in the deliverable. It will be delivered on time.

Concerning the other tasks:

• a DMP template outline is now available and will be further developed, e.g. to get it more structured;
• the task on PIDs is looking to hold a second workshop on PIDs around the annual meeting timing. Vasily will contact Kat to see if / how WP6 can help;
• the upcoming work on the metadata framework update and associated consultation were discussed last week with Nicolas and Abigail. It will be a different process than the data policy consultation that will more specifically focus on WP3 partners.

WP3

Sylvie will leave Diamond and ExPaNDS in October 2021. Diamond is meeting early September to discuss her replacement.

Carlo has triggered task leaders to initiate the work on T3.3, T3.4 and T3.5. For the upcoming milestone, WP3 created a standalone and easy-to-install SciCat with associated documentation. It includes the search API with example data, including metadata following the techniques ontology. It will be useful for partners who don’t have a catalogue yet and for the training material to be developed in the frame of WP3. The document supporting the milestone is being finalised, adding input on what is planned also for ICAT.

WP4

Following the mid-term review, Anton now has a clear idea on the next steps for WP4:

• containerising non-Jupyter workflows;
• registering ExPaNDS providers with EOSC;
• finalising the testing framework both for Jupyter and non-Jupyter services.

Andy informed us a parallel portal for the search API that had been developed at ELI is being considered to be taken over at the ESRF, which would be good sustainability news. This still needs to be clarified.

WP5

Next week WP5 meets to organise the next period. The upcoming deliverables and milestone for August and September are in good shape and should all be ready on time.

WP6

Upon Isabelle’s return this week, Kat will be finalising the M24 deliverables for WP6. The organisation for the librarian symposium is progressing, with confirmed speakers from F1000 for example.

Kat is also working on small changes to the ExPaNDS.eu website following the remark to add a disclaimer for deliverables that are published but not yet accepted by the EC. See issue #28.

The metrics survey results are being collated by François at Diamond, and is only missing 2-3 facilities who didn’t manage to answer. How and when the results will be published and if the raw data will be made available are still to be defined.

The promotional video’s release was postponed to avoid the summer season quiet and will happen around the beginning of September.

AOB

No AOB.

🙋 Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Nicolas, Alun, Silvia, Ana, Uwe, Isabelle

Introduction

Welcome to Nicolas as new WP2 co-leader from ALBA

Nicolas is our newest PEB member, as WP2 co-leader, in replacement of Daniel.

Agree on the targets for the KPIs in the technical report

To take our reviewers short-term recommendation #1 into account, we reviewed the KPIs from the Technical Report - chapter 1.1 and agreed on the following indicative target values:

• 14 000 scientists to be reached by ExPaNDS dissemination by the end of the project. Basis: number of users in the Diamond database (biggest). An additional KPI could later be the number of ambassadors, which will be of course lower but showing in-depth interactions.


• 10/10 facilities with a plan to implement at least one FAIR-related action as a direct effect of ExPaNDS, be it implementing PIDs for data, updating the data policy, budgeting a data steward, …


• Target for the facilities maturity at xx% - to be estimated before the end of the week based on the first replies each partner will provide to Alun and Carlo by then.


• From the 11 reference datasets, have 5 analysis pipelines available in EOSC. Uwe explained the target should not be to have all of them but rather concentrate on the few with the most added-value. Alun also suggested adding the number of partners registered as EOSC service providers as a KPI.


• Suggestion to have a target on the total number of attendees to ExPaNDS workshops, at 500, instead of trying to have a number per workshop. To be confirmed with Ana.


• Target of at least 5 partners in the EOSC Association. We already have Elettra, EGI and DESY. UKRI is also in the process of becoming a full member and Diamond is considering it, so it seems a reasonable target.

Review the PaNOSC/ExPaNDS mapping of activities

To take our reviewers short-term recommendation #5 into account, Sophie mentioned the ongoing discussion in GitHub on the wiki mapping ExPaNDS and PaNOSC activities and asked for the remaining persons to have a look if possible, again before the end of the week.

Review new training and dissemination plans

On the training plan, any feedback on the draft table is to be sent to Ana ASAP. Two open questions were discussed and it was decided:

• not to include any policy workshop in the plan for now,
• to focus on ExPaNDS workshops in the plan (i.e. not include PaNOSC’s train-the-trainer workshop) but amend the wiki to make clearer that the FAIR and EOSC workshops were ExPaNDS workshops.

On the updated dissemination plan, Isabelle is working on it with her team.

Follow-up on longer-term recommendations from reviewers (see issue #27)

On the longer-term recommendations, the #4 (issue #19) was discussed as WP2 thinks it needs clarification. Brian will draft something and share it with Sophie ASAP. The observation is to be uploaded to the EC portal before the end of the week.

Sophie will clarify with Isabelle if something needs to be included regarding the recommendations on dissemination.

Other recommendations didn’t raise any objections.

Status quo per WP

AOB

Careful, due to the holiday season, there will be no PEB on the 3rd of August. Next PEB: 17th of August.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Ana, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

Feedback on mid-term review results

We received the results from the evaluation of ExPaNDS at the mid-term review at the end of June 2021. The report is consistent with the review itself: reviewers were pretty happy with the work done until now but insist we have a lot more to do in the second period.

The recommendations were discussed and although the requests on the KPIs can be a little tricky, there was no objection to the report. We can reply with observations to the report within 30 days in the EU portal, e.g. if we think there was a misunderstanding.

The next steps for the review process are:

1. Send feedback or observations on the report itself - a priori not needed
2. Update the technical report with the recommendations for this period (chapter 1.4) and re-submit it in the EU portal within the next 2-3 weeks
3. Take into account the recommendations for the next period in the WPs (chapter 1.5 and rest of document)

Sophie will prepare the issues for points 2 and 3.

Status quo per WP

WP1

The call for participants to the EOSC-Association task forces is now out. Brian mentioned UKRI was now joining the EOSC-A.

WP2

WP2 currently focuses on writing the update of the data policy framework. On 16.06 the monthly meeting for WP2 took place (see minutes), showing normal progress on all other tasks.

Brian confirmed the save-the-date will soon be sent out for the librarian symposium and informed us he had a new starter at STFC for WP2 (and WP4). Kat will send their details to Sophie for the “welcome package”.

WP3

Following the workshop, Alun had a meeting with all task leaders last week. They agreed on the schedule for the second period, on regular progress meetings and on dedicated kick-off meetings for the tasks that are starting now.

Carlo is working on the technical prerequisites to achieve the milestone due in August.

Sylvie reported the PaNET ontology v1.0 was now available in EGI’s OntoPortal (own instance of BioPortal set up by EGI for the occasion) which will now be onboarded to EOSC by Andrea.

WP4

Following the onboarding procedure presentation by Andrea and Owen, Anton will now monitor the onboarding of the individual DA services of our partners in EOSC (N.B: it’s a KPI).

Anton is getting the reference use cases to work at as many facilities as possible, starting with CrystFEL, which is done by a new starter at DESY. This will be the first non-Jupyter example of an ExPaNDS cloud DA service.

Anton also mentioned its NFDI project for Germany-wide PaN data management had been granted. It will be an interesting related project for ExPaNDS.

WP5

Ana reported the annual report for the 2nd year of ExPaNDS was in progress, as well as the training platform evaluation deliverable.

The new starter (Antoine) is now confirmed to arrive on ExPaNDS on Sept, 1st for WP5.

As requested by the reviewers, Ana is working with the other WP5 members on a more precise plan for training.

The training material for WP3 needs the 1st data catalogue to be ready, it will then be useful as a roadmap for other facilities. The training material for the use of the ontologies needs to be clarified.

WP6

WP6 is carrying on its activities on the use case with WP3, the organisation of the librarian symposium and the work on profiles for the website. The meeting with Brian on the taxonomy is planned for this Friday.

The promotional video is now finalised and will be launched in the next few days.

The update of the ExPaNDS presentation is also finalised, Sophie needs to review it and upload it to the EU portal.

Isabelle noted that the 14th SRI was reported to the end of March 2022, and that she would look at submitting an abstract with PaNOSC. Alun mentioned the NOBUGS 13 event which should happen in Autumn was a possibly good opportunity to reach the “RI/Facility’s scientific software and computing staff” stakeholder group.

AOB

Alun informed us there was a new division at PSI for Scientific Computing, Theory, and Data where he and Carlo are moving. It includes a dedicated group for scientific data management.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Ana, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

Patrick thanked the PEB for the good work in preparation for the review. The criticism raised by our reviewers was reasonable and constructive. We will notably need to be more careful with the monitoring in the second period, during which a lot of implementation tasks are expected to happen in a short time. The report itself has not yet been sent by the Commission but we expect it to arrive this week or the next.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie reported briefly on the EOSC symposium 2021 and the EOSC Association’s task forces (which are a follow-up of the EOSC EB working groups). The PaN community is not yet very much represented there so Sophie encouraged everyone to spread the word for the upcoming open calls for participants.

As a possible project to be submitted to the EOSC secretariat, Isabelle suggested developing a PaN aggregation of publication databases. The open source Zenodo would be for example a good platform. Ana also mentioned the French HAL as a good general-purpose database.

WP2

In the frame of the data policy framework update, Brian and Abigail are analysing the feedback received from all partner facilities following the consultation. This will be the basis for the updated version of the framework due in August.

The FAIR implementation story of ExPaNDS for FAIRsFAIR Abigail had written has now been published. We are their first “Adoption story”.

Following the meeting with ISIS@MACH, Abigail identified some gaps in training material for data stewardship for PaN. WP2 will try to fill those.

Brian informed us he was currently engaging with ISIS on an end-to-end neutron use case on FAIR data analysis and data catalogues and that he would keep us updated.

WP3

Alun reported that the half-day workshop he organised with Carlo for WP3 allowed for useful exchanges. Facilities like SOLEIL and MAX IV were able to make good progress already. Carlo is now collating the feedback and answers to the questionnaire evaluating the progress of each facility against the roadmap. Alun will follow-up with task leaders on the topics that were raised and plan for future meetings.

The ontology deliverable was published and presented by Steve at the EOSC symposium. The ontologies themselves are not yet available in EOSC but Sylvie and EGI are working on it (see issue).

WP4

VISA is now the solution chosen by PaNOSC for the WP4-related functionalities of the PaN portal. For the search API, a parallel development made by ELI is to be used.

To discuss the fact that VISA’s functionalities do not fit all our ExPaNDS services (in particular: authenticated access only and every service needing to be launched via OpenStack), Anton, Patrick and Sophie had a dedicated meeting with Andy, Fabio and Jordi this morning. The result was that PaNOSC might help us fill the gaps by considering to:

• integrate the search API in VISA directly too, in addition to the ELI portal
• investigate direct access to Jupyter-hub in VISA (today only possible through OpenStack)

This would notably allow us to use VISA also for the pipelines running on Slurm, thanks to the “Jupyter in Slurm” package developed by ESRF.

VISA was already made open source in GitHub by ILL. Contribution rules and an agreement on maintenance of the whole service will now be initiated. ILL intends to maintain the PaN VISA repositories up to date with the production ILL VISA, which is very good for sustainability.

All this still being developed and discussed, it was agreed that our upcoming testing framework shall be developed independently. Side remark, Andy confirmed that the ESRF was using MAX IV’s testing framework for Jupyter.

Anton reported that since several facilities are looking to onboard their data analysis platform directly in EOSC, Andrea will be presenting the onboarding procedure during the next WP4 meeting on Friday.

In terms of resources for WP4, Ana confirmed SOLEIL found a new person to work with Majid: Eric. Patrick also mentioned the recent interviews at DESY for a WP4 position.

WP5

Thibaud reported the recruitment for a new person for WP5 was now accepted and only pending the candidate’s signature. He would be starting in July or August.

Thibaud is working on the annual report due in August as a final task before handing over the WP to Ana.

The PaN training aggregator developed by Oliver is now live although not completely finalised (it still needs a manual intervention from Oliver to register because of firewall configuration). People have been adding material there, including from DESY and CERIC-ERIC, the ease of use being highly appreciated. Uwe confirmed the report on the platform evaluation is in progress (due in Sept.).

WP6

Isabelle appreciated the session she contributed to at the EOSC symposium 2021, noting for example good contacts formed with EOSC-synergy.

The Metrics questionnaire was sent to facilities yesterday, with an expected reply by the 16th of July.

The use cases with WP3 and the Diamond user community ambassadors will be developed further over the summer.

Kat has been liaising with the heads of comms at our different facilities to have feedback on the promotional video and organise the next meeting with them. Final touches will now be integrated into the video before it is made public. HZDR updated its logo so our ExPaNDS cloud logo was also updated.

AOB

The chances of having the annual meeting as face to face were discussed. As a back-up scenario, Isabelle thought of having at least local meetings at each site, to make it a bit better than a regular Zoom-only conference.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Brian, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle

Introduction

News from Daniel

Daniel is leaving ALBA at the end of June 2021. He will make proper announcements to the different WPs but already mentioned Nicolas was to replace him for WP2 and WP4 and Guifré for WP3. For the Technical Coordinator (TC) position, Daniel estimated a required involvement of 3 to 4 hours a week, assuming no prior engagement in the technical WPs. Everyone was invited to suggest possible (and willing) candidates to Patrick and Sophie so we can nominate a new TC in July.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie reported having re-submitted the mid-term review periodic report to the EC after it was rejected to “stop the clock”.

WP2

Brian reported a regular overall progress. The first meeting for the data policy framework update is planned in June.

Brian is also working with FAIRsFAIR on their task to harmonise data catalogues and thinks we could be a good use case for them. He will plan a meeting with Alun next month on the topic.

WP3

Alun and Carlo planned for the 18th of June a half-day workshop for WP3, to discuss the status and settle the work plan for the rest of the project.

The ontology deliverable (D3.2) was finalised and submitted for internal project review last Friday by Sylvie. The techniques ontology (PaNET) will be made public in parallel in the next few days. Brian will try and finalise his review next week, a few days delay is thus to be expected for the delivery to the EC. Sylvie reported Steve managed a submission for the EOSC symposium 2021 on this topic.

WP4

The message from PaNOSC WP4 saying they had stopped the development of the PaN portal to focus on ILL’s VISA was commented on. We will wait for Andy’s return for a proper statement on what it implies for ExPaNDS. Anton explained that, in any case, it does not help him in the definition of the next action steps at each facility and noted the timing was a bit unfortunate with our imminent review. Patrick thinks we will find a solution for the portal if our services are reachable and helpful so that is where we need to focus our efforts for now. Alun also noted the unavailability of the PaN portal was a foreseen risk at the proposal stage already.

WP5

Thibaud reported ongoing recruitment at SOLEIL for the development of the training content aggregator. A few good candidates applied and interviews are in progress.

Thibaud plans to start organising the next workshops for ExPaNDS for WP3 and WP4, defining topics, sites and timing.

Uwe reported progress from PaNOSC WP8 to integrate content in PaN-learning.org, e.g. for the HERCULES school. He noted again that photon sources lagged behind in terms of content. Anton confirmed people often reported a lack of introductory material at photon sources in general. The usual practice of beamline scientists seems to often be 1-to-1 support to their users on the tools and techniques, during their visit. Thibaud reminded all that this is why we have a content aggregator in development.

WP6

Isabelle updated us on the user engagement at Diamond with a first successful meeting where half of the 50 ambassadors were present. A second meeting discussing the use cases in more detail is being prepared with the help of Sylvie and Steve. WP6 managed a submission for the EOSC symposium 2021 on this topic.

The librarian symposium prepared with WP2 was rescheduled to the 30th of September. The draft programme is progressing and will be circulated.

Isabelle was grateful for the feedback received by PEB members on the metrics survey, it will now be sent around to facilities. The user questionnaire is also being finalised. Trying it out on the 25 Diamond users ambassadors demonstrated it worked well and that the feedback received could be really valuable.

Isabelle also reported she was seeking a better solution than the online versions of the AAAS and ESOF for outreach, in the frame of the upcoming deliverable on international conferences.

Finally, the promotional video is heading in the right direction and will soon be made available.

AOB

Next PEB meeting will be on the 22nd of June, the 8th of June being our review. Sophie reminded everyone that next week we already upload the final slides for our reviewers and PO to see in advance. Anton, Isabelle and Patrick are aligning their presentations and a few tweaks are still being made for the remaining WPs.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Organisation for the EC review on the 8th of June

The reviewers (not known yet) and our PO are expecting the slides to be made available to them ahead of the review, on the 2nd of June. Patrick asked every WP to upload to this indico page a finalised version of the presentations for the 21st of May, to leave time to check internally the overall consistency. Final slides will be uploaded to a dedicated folder that was already shared with our PO (the link is in Indico).

On the day of the review, Patrick reminded all WP leaders to make sure they were available from 9am to 4pm CEST, in case of questions during other presentations. The “demo team” can attend the afternoon talks only. The final and agreed agenda is the one from Indico.

Application to the EOSC symposium

We discussed five possible applications for the upcoming EOSC symposium (deadline for application on the 20th of May):

• Panel on OS policies with INFRA-EOSC-5 task force (Brian) - Sophie will forward the ongoing discussion to Brian confirming we are happy to participate
• User engagement for a lightning talk (Isabelle)
• PaN ontologies for a 15-min presentation (Steve?) - Sylvie will ask Steve
• PaNOSC use cases (Andy)
• AAI (Andy) - these last two are preliminary ideas that still need to be discussed within PaNOSC

Upcoming deliverables and milestones

The aim and status of the several upcoming deliverables and milestones for the next months were discussed. See status quo per WP.

Status quo per WP

WP2

D2.3 - Final data policy framework for Photon and Neutron RIs (PSI) - 31 Aug 2021
Brian and Abigail discussed and scoped the data policy framework update. WP2 is preparing to have it ready for internal review by the end of July.

WP3

D3.2 - Release V1.0 ExPaNDS ontology available as an EOSC online service (PSI) - 31 May 2021
This deliverable is being finalised.

MS12 - Metadata catalogue release (PSI) - 31 Aug 2021
Alun plans to set up a container with the data catalogue and the search API installed to demonstrate the use of the search feature on our data. This demonstrator should be useful in the overall roadmap.

WP4

D4.3 - Testing and Validation framework (MAX IV) - 31 Aug 2021
The testing framework is progressing well for the Jupyter-based use cases. Following Zdenek’s presentation at the end of April, Andy mentioned it was being tested at ESRF. Anton reported the WP had to progress on the framework for remote desktop applications now.

On the topic of remote desktops, and as already mentioned by PaNOSC, the PaN portal will only support launching VMs in OpenStack. In ExPaNDS we don’t have the resources to deploy a production OpenStack service at the facilities that don’t have it already. Besides the possibility to interface the PaN portal to our local analysis services ourselves, e.g. to Kubernetes - which was estimated by ILL to take in the order of 55 weeks of work - ExPaNDS has the possibility to integrate local services directly into the EOSC (e.g. EOSC marketplace).

WP5

MS16 - First (pilot) national training event organised and performed (SOLEIL) - 31 Aug 2021
Thibaud will start preparing the wording for this milestone which we consider achieved given the 2 online workshops that already took place within the frame of WP5.

D5.2 - Annual report on training activities, workshops held, materials published and investigations performed (SOLEIL) - 31 Aug 2021
No specific comment, this deliverable is straightforward.

A preliminary report for the e-learning platform evaluation (the deliverable due in Sept. 2021) is in preparation and the plan is still to have something ready for the review.

WP6

D6.11 - ExPaNDS presentation for conferences (Diamond) - 30 Jun 2021
This is the usual update of the ExPaNDS slide-deck.

D6.5 - ExPaNDS representation material for relevant large international conferences (Diamond) - 31 Aug 2021
MS22 - AAAS & ESOF attendance (Diamond) - 31 Aug 2021
These were significantly pushed back because of COVID-19 when we prepared the amendment and are already upcoming. WP6 has them on their radar and the different possibilities will be discussed in a parallel WP1-WP6 catch-up.

D6.20 - Assistance to the development of the taxonomy strategy for the relevant data catalogues (Diamond) - 31 Aug 2021
MS29 - Taxonomy strategy (Diamond) - 31 Aug 2021
Isabelle discussed this deliverable with Brian and will trigger a dedicated meeting, possibly with the techniques ontology people too.

Isabelle also drew our attention to 3 surveys being prepared by WP6 on which she will seek feedback on from the PEB:

• the survey on communication and dissemination activities set up with Nicoletta for all ExPaNDS/PaNOSC people (see attached document in e-mail from Kat on 11.05.2021 18:35 CEST)
• a survey for the users
• a survey on ExPaNDS metrics for our facilities

AOB

Brian drew Alun’s attention to FAIRsFAIR work on data catalogues, in particular on metadata mapping into DCAT. Tobias and Alejandra are involved but we should ensure Carlo and Alun are in the loop too. We should for instance refer to this work in the upcoming deliverables.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Abigail, Silvia, Anton, Ana, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Mid-term review rehearsal: what now?

After the useful rehearsal, we all have some homework to do fixing the presentations and Patrick suggested to do it now that the feedback is still fresh. The preparatory meetings will however be cancelled until we know the actual review date.

A new event was set up in Indico, taking into account a few changes suggested during the rehearsal. The final agenda still needs to be validated by the PO.

For the report on progress and finances (WP1), Daniel suggested trying to highlight the work carried out ‘behind the scene’ at each facility. It is important for sustainability and also to show the impact ExPaNDS already has. It is also something our previous PO noted to be an advantage we have compared to other INFRA-EOSC-5 projects, the fact that we can make changes at the ‘root’ of where the data and software are generated.

Report in the EU portal closing this Wednesday (28th)

Sophie asked for a final review by the PEB of the “technical report” to be submitted to the European Commission before the end of the reporting period, tomorrow (28/04/2021). In addition to the WP report, the common parts like how we fulfilled our objectives (chapter 1.1) and the public summary still need to be endorsed by some WPs (WP4, 5 and 6).

Status quo per WP

WP1

WP1 was mainly focused on the reporting recently. Sophie however pointed everyone to the wiki that was written with the help of Carlo and Rolf following the workshop on EOSC. In addition to what was presented during the workshop, it contains some concrete best practices examples for metadata usage.

WP2

Abigail reported a successful RDA session on PaN COVID-19 data with good talks, but unfortunately no time for discussion. Andy agreed and mentioned a follow-up workshop was in preparation (Brian, Andy, Frank). Talks will also be made available by the RDA.

On PIDs, the WP continues to develop the scope of this task. Abigail recalled that the write-up from the good practices meeting was available in WP2’s drive. On this topic, Daniel wondered if a dedicated event on the implementation part of PIDs should be organised. The next EOSC PaN symposium or a dedicated Technical Coordination Workshop were mentioned as possible candidates. This suggestion will be followed-up by Sophie.

Data policy consultations are now all finished and WP2 is missing only 2 reports (due end of April).

Abigail also contributed to the part describing ExPaNDS in the update of the SPARC Europe analysis of Open Science Policies in Europe that will be published around the end of April. The implementation story of ExPaNDS for FAIRsFAIR is also finished and approved and will be published by FAIRsFAIR in the next few days.

Finally, Abigail mentioned the upcoming FAIRsFAIR’s third synchronisation workshops, organised as a series of sessions between the 29th April and the 10th June 2021. Abigail will be representing ExPaNDS at most of the sessions, Oliver also agreed to attend the session on skills for FAIR. We are still looking for someone to represent ExPaNDS for the session on the “FAIR ecosystem” (WP3?) and sustainability and governance (WP1?).

WP3

Sylvie reported recent work in WP3 was focused on writing the upcoming deliverable on ontologies. The ontology itself is called “PaNET” and will be made public in BioPortal right after the internal review.

A best practices meeting is being organised by ELI between 18-20th of May 2021 to share experience between partners on topics like user portals, data ingestion, logbooks and NeXus at PaN facilities. ExPaNDS has several contributions planned.

Sophie reminded Sylvie there was a milestone due for August 2021 called Metadata catalogue release that we should keep in mind.

WP4

Anton reported he went over the portable container deployment plan during the last meeting and now intends to use the next meeting this Friday (30/04/2021) to finalise the “check-list”.

For the testing framework, Zdenek organised a presentation to show a use case where Jupyter based applications are tested and discuss it with the other partners. The meeting is planned for this Thursday (29/04/2021).

WP5

Ana reported recent works in WP5 focused on the rehearsal preparation and reporting.

Abigail mentioned she had been contacted by ISIS@Mach who are asking for help in data stewardship training for a young researcher. FAIRsFAIR will be helping for the data stewardship part but Abigail will also see what specific PaN content we can bring them. A meeting is planned in the first half of May and Abigail will keep Ana informed of the developments.

WP6

Kat reported she had already revised the WP6 slides following the rehearsal and worked on the technical report for WP1 and on the KPIs for dissemination.

This Thursday (29/04/2021) there will be the Diamond ExPaNDS user meeting, a two hours online meeting with the user community of Diamond who volunteered to be more directly engaged in the grant. Mark will first present the project, then the 6 use cases will be presented to fuel a Q&A session with the users. This event is part of the user meeting replacement strategy.

The WP profiles are also progressing for the website update. All WP provided a list of people to be included.

WP6 created an ExPaNDS background for Zoom and is working on a new visual of ExPaNDS facilities on the European map for Anton to be used at the review.

For the promotional video, Ben is expecting feedback on the text for the 3 internal footages (Abigail for WP2, Carlo for WP3 and Oliver for training). These will be then filmed in the next two weeks or so.

AOB

Patrick presented ExPaNDS to DESY directors during a DESY - NIIEFA Efremov meeting on the 26/04/2021.

Abigail will miss the following PEBs until the 22nd of June.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Ana, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

Welcome to Ana

Ana started at Soleil last week, she is replacing Nazaré for ExPaNDS.

News from our PO

Our PO confirmed to Patrick our project is now managed by the REA (European Research Executive Agency), from the 1st of April 2021 onwards. Christian will still be responsible for us in terms of policy, in particular around the collaboration between the INFRA-EOSC-5 projects. For finances and general guidance in relation to the grant management, we will have a new PO.

Regarding the user meeting replacement, he agreed on the arguments we put forward and stressed we had to include everything in the Technical Report. He also confirmed the modification of the content of the deliverable needed an amendment that we will start right after the end of the reporting period.

The progress of the Technical Report was discussed and notably the deviations. We are still underspending significantly, Sophie will share the figures with the PEB as soon as they are ready. In the meantime, she asked for the review by all WP leaders of the active document:

• reply to the comments on their part of the description of activities,
• check the explanations suggested in the deviations (see comments also).

Mid-term review rehearsal preparation

On the review meeting rehearsal, it was agreed that we should keep the meeting internal, with the CB members acting as reviewers. Brian also suggested asking Juan (Bicarregui) if he could join, having the advantages of a) being at STFC, b) not being involved on a daily basis in ExPaNDS and c) being highly involved in EOSC.

On the guidelines for the presentation sent by Patrick and Sophie, Alun suggested adding as a last point the outlook for the rest of the project. Daniel also suggested to stress the importance of the facility-work done “behind the scene”. Alun confirmed it will be a highlight in WP3’s presentation with the evaluation of the progress of each facility in the road towards EOSC. It will also probably be the case for WP2 with the data policy consultation. Patrick confirmed it was really important to show the impact on our facilities of ExPaNDS work because this is a privileged position we have compared to the regional projects for example.

For the demo, there is good progress in the WP4 part but we still need to integrate WP3 (Alun) and WP5 (Uwe).

Status quo per WP

🙋 Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

EGI-ACE call for use cases

The EGI-ACE project opened a call for use cases, providing for 2 years storage and compute resources to selected data services. Through EGI we already have access / provide resources to horizontal infrastructures but keeping this possibility in mind can be good for punctual or specific needs.

Review meeting rehearsal preparation

To prepare for next week’s session, Sophie and Alun reminded all WP leaders to add highlights and foreseen structure of their WP presentations in the slide decks linked in the Indico event. We didn’t receive news from the Commission yet.

Status quo per WP

WP1

For the report to the European Commission, Sophie recalled that the financial statements were expected by the end of March (3/11 partners have submitted them so far). For the technical part, the shared document is progressing quite well thanks to the WP contributions. Sophie encouraged the missing WPs (WP4 and parts of WP5) to finalise their part asap in the shared document. So next steps are:

• add pictures (All)
• finalise WP5 report (Thibaud)
• finalise WP4 report (Anton)
• check overall homogeneity and add comments/tracked changes if needed (Sophie)
• book meetings with each WP and Patrick for the deviations part once the PMs spent are available (Sophie)

The other focus of WP1 right now is the upcoming workshop on EOSC. Kat helped a lot with dissemination and we have 57 registrants already. Sophie also stated her appreciation of the help of EGI but also PSI, HZB and PaNOSC WP6 in making an interesting agenda.

WP2

Abigail presented the PaN metadata framework to the FAIR TF of the INFRA-EOSC-5 projects today.

Data policy consultation results have been finalised for DESY, Elettra and ISIS and interviews are now complete for ALBA, Diamond, HZDR and MAX IV. The discussions and the feedback received so far are very interesting. Abigail reminded the remaining facilities (HZB, Soleil and PSI) that the results were expected by the end of April. To start writing the final version of the data policy framework, meetings have now been planned every two weeks, starting in mid-May.

For the DMP task, partners are currently invited to provide comments on the RDMO questions in this spreadsheet (see worksheet 2).

For the upcoming PaNSIG session at the 17th RDA plenary, the organisers offered a “day ticket” of 100£ and a bulk registration for PaN. A separate meeting will be held with WP6/WP1 to see what we can offer and to whom.

WP3

In addition to the recent reporting activities, Sylvie mentioned the presentation organised last Friday on ontologies. Alejandra shared her general and long-acquired experience on the topic and Steve presented the update for the upcoming ExPaNDS deliverable. There was a good attendance and follow-up meetings between Brian, Alejandra and Steve are planned in the following days, to discuss e.g. relating our work to EMMO. PSI beamline scientists are also being involved via Carlo to provide feedback on what Diamond is preparing.

During last week’s NeXus codecamp, the script developed by ExPaNDS WP3 to extract NeXus classes and fields into an OWL was presented and well received by the NIAC. There will be a formal vote during the next assembly to accept it or not. If it is accepted, it will be hosted in NeXus Github and benefit from its sustainability and governance model.

WP4

The framework deliverable (D4.1) is now delivered to the EC and made public: . It is a month late but Anton appreciated the discussions it raised and thought it was worth the extra time to straighten it up.

The testing framework and how to link it to the portal are currently being discussed. Anton participated in last week’s PaNOSC meeting and is also meeting Fabio, the new PaNOSC WP4 leader this week.

WP5

PaNOSC’s “Train the trainers” workshop for the PaN learning platform is now finished. Andy asked if ExPaNDS participants had feedback to provide. Developing a course on the platform is a lot of work which can be overwhelming for our scientist (case of DESY participant). The feature to upload or link to a video or external resource will probably be more easily used at first.

WP6

On top of the reporting activities, which include for WP6 additional work on the KPIs and update of the communication strategy, Isabelle reported the WP3 use cases were now integrated in the slide deck to present ExPaNDS. The commercial FAIR use case for tomography will also be included in about two weeks.

Isabelle is also working to get some metrics for the review meeting, on the number of publications from PaN in the first period for example. In addition, the visuals to help demonstrate what the PaN services landing page could look like progressed and Isabelle will be sharing them with the WPs for feedback.

Following feedback from the annual meeting, the editorial process to add profiles in the expands.eu website has also started with the aim to present actual people who are working for the grant.

Regarding the user meeting replacement, Isabelle called the Diamond user community and received 40 responses from possible ambassadors happy to be more engaged and to give feedback on the use cases we are developing. A local collaboration with Sylvie to map publications to data DOIs in 12 different disciplines at Diamond was also started.

In addition, Ben who used to work at MAX IV is working closely with Patrick on a 6-9 minutes “promotional video” for the project, to be delivered for the review.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Sustainability of PaN(OSC) services

Following a presentation by Ornela to WP1 of the progress of the sustainability models for PaNOSC, Sophie reported the main conclusions to the PEB. There are 3 possible types of business models:

• MoU in the community for maintenance of open source common tool and contribution governance (e.g.: PaN software catalogue);
• use of community tools or commercial services (e.g.: AAI, long-term storage);
• establishment of a dedicated RI for PaN data management with a defined funding model.

The main outputs of PaNOSC that are to be sustained are for example: the PaN search API, the updated PaN software catalogue, the central PaN portal and the evolution management of the local replicas, the PaN learning platform, the data transfer services and Umbrella (which already decided option 2, which is to go for EduTeams).

PaNOSC will start presenting these different possibilities to senior management to survey the different possibilities and invites ExPaNDS to start raising awareness on its side too. Alun with his privileged situation between the CB, LEAPS and LENS will see to it.

Next annual meeting organisational committee

PSI confirmed they would be happy to host the PaN EOSC symposium of 2021. Sophie will let PaNOSC know and start planning the organisational committee meetings.

Status quo per WP

WP1

For the technical part of the report to the European Commission, the details of the activities carried out since the beginning of the project have to be broken down per WP and per each contributing partner. The overall progress of the report is monitored in this GitHub issue. A first version for the WP reports is expected by Sophie by the end of the week.

Sophie reported progress on the organisation of the workshop on EOSC. The draft agenda is available here and the “save the date” will be sent soon, thanks to Kat’s help.

WP2

Data policy consultation results have been finalised for ISIS and Elettra. Other facilities carry on (see progress here).

Abigail reported the meetings on the DMP task are now regular. A typical list of questions to be asked when doing a DMP is being settled and examples of different proposals for beamtime are being shared.

The FAIR implementation story of ExPaNDS for FAIRsFAIR Abigail wrote was approved and will be published in FAIRsFAIR website very soon.

Brian mentioned the PaNSIG session at the 17th RDA plenary had now a confirmed timeslot (see link).

WP3

Alun confirmed PSI’s data catalogue would soon be harvested by B2FIND. They just need to ‘switch it on’, technically everything is ready.

Steve presented the NeXus ontology work last Friday to WP3. It can be found in GitHub, BioPortal (restricted, ask Sylvie for access) and WebProtege (accessible after sign-in). Its publication in open access will need to be approved by the NIAC. The techniques ontology is also available as a demo version on GitHub. A presentation to WP3 is planned on the 26th of March.

Sylvie reported that Andrea confirmed BioPortal was happy to be on-boarded to EOSC, which is very good news for us and also a good addition to the EOSC service portfolio. They are currently working on registering themselves as service providers. It will then be easy to link our PaN ontology as an EOSC “sub-service”.

FInally, the search API deliverable of PaNOSC is now finished, Sylvie contributed specifically to the ontology part.

WP4

Anton is working to integrate the useful comments he received from the reviewers to his framework deliverable and will be delivering it asap.

Following the conversations with Daniel and Alun on the next steps for WP4, the tasks are being broken down into two teams: one for infrastructure and one for data analysis.

WP5

Uwe reported that Oliver had installed Tess e-learning platform on a VM at HZDR. The workflows is an interesting feature, for instance to have a DA pipeline including compression steps e.g.. (He reminded us that there was a working group in LEAPS working on data compression.) This will be showcased at the review meeting as part of the task to select appropriate learning platforms. Then the integration into the PaN learning platform with PaNOSC will need to happen.

The second part of the “Train the trainers” workshop is next week.

On ExPaNDS workshops preparation, there are continued discussions with DANS (EOSC-hub) for DMP training material and the workshop on our integration to EOSC by WP1 is progressing well. It is planned for 6-7th of April, see WP1 report.

WP6

Isabelle is working on a FAIR use case with commercial stakeholders, who would beneficiate from our PaN search API to offer services on top. The use case is being prepared with WP3 (Carlo) to have it for the review meeting.
Alun confirmed it would be a useful use case to show and Andy compared it with the similar possible BATTERY2030+ collaboration that arose when he presented PaNOSC to their RDM event.

The updated slide deck to present ExPaNDS and its achievements is in progress and will be soon proposed for review.

The draft agenda is now ready for the WP2 joint librarian event. We are now working on the topics.

Finally the video with the stakeholders interviews for the user meeting is progressing, in particular the storyboard and the processing of the DESY material. It will now be extended to other facilities.

AOB

Fabio is replacing Sandor (XFEL) as WP4 leader of PaNOSC.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Thibaud, Uwe, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Next annual meeting organisational committee

For the next PaNOSC/ExPaNDS annual meeting, Kat reminded us that last year we had started the organisational committee meeting around this time of the year. Even if the event is likely to be online again, it is quite a lot of work to prepare the agenda, find good speakers and have a smooth event.
Diamond’s webinar Zoom licence will be made available again but we need a hosting facility. Last year, it was ELI (PaNOSC) so this time it would be one of us. All were encouraged to think about it for the next PEB. Possible candidates were ALBA, keeping in mind they already organised the LEAPS plenary on the 20-22 of October and PSI.

Review meeting preparation

As an update for the review meeting preparation we followed the actions listed in the dedicated issue. See comments there.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie reported some progress on the organisation of the workshop on EOSC with Giuseppe (EGI). The goal is to define what an ExPaNDS EOSC service is. Contributions from our colleagues from the EOSC projects are being planned (EOSC Nordic, EOSC Synergy, EOSC-hub). Provisional dates are 6th and 7th of April, from 10:30 to 12:30 CET, they will be confirmed asap. WP1 needs to involve now WP3 and WP4 in the preparation and it was agreed that we would ask Carlo, Sylvie, Linh for WP3 and Chris and Franz for WP4.

Sophie also reported the reporting period to the European Commission had started yesterday. Instructions will be sent for the financial report later today and for the technical report soon after that.

WP2

On the data policy consultation, Abigail shared the table to monitor progress at the different facilities and encouraged participants to keep it updated. The feedback to WP2 is due by the end of April so the first two steps (finding the right contact and scheduling the interviews) should now be done. Additionally, Abigail is writing an ‘implementation story’ for FAIRsFAIR, explaining how we used their recommendations for our data policy framework.

The report from the PIDs and DOI session is available for participants to review and provide feedback to (file access restricted to WP2 for now).

The PaN session at the RDA plenary was accepted, without a confirmed timeslot yet. Brian now would like to discuss the possible subsidy from ExPaNDS/PaNOSC travel money to cover the registration fees of speakers at least, of bulk registrations at best. A meeting on Friday is scheduled with WP6 and will be used to discuss this.

WP3

Alun reported progress implementing the ontologies developed at beamlines for some techniques. PaNOSC is also working on the demonstration of the search API where ExPaNDS is also contributing.

With regards to the ontology deliverable, Sylvie agreed to contact EGI to discuss further the feasibility of onboarding BioPortal as an EOSC service. It is indeed part of our upcoming deliverable that the ontology is made available in the EOSC portal, even if it is through another service.

WP4

The integration of the PaN portal in EOSC was discussed and it might be that each facility deployment would need to be onboarded and not only a central instance hosted by one of the facilities. Which means that our integration in EOSC has to also involve the e-infrastructures. Anton shared in that regard EOSC-hub’s ‘Integration handbook for service providers’.

Anton updated us on the status of WP4’s deliverables:

• D4.1 on EOSC integration is being finalised and will be sent for internal review today or tomorrow,
• D4.2 with the reference datasets and associated pipelines was finalised and delivered: 10.5281/zenodo.4558708
• D4.3 on the test framework will be the next focus.

The upcoming WP4 meeting on Friday will be the occasion to discuss the roadmap for the technical implementations (see previous minutes) and to progress on the selection of a use case for the review meeting.

WP5

Thibaud mentioned the Jupyter Notebook implementation in the PaN learning platform was a milestone for PaNOSC scheduled in May 2021. They are however aiming to have it done by the end of the month for the second part of the train the trainers workshop.

During the FAIRsFAIR week, there will be a dedicated session on training. It is via invitation only but Thibaud should be able to get it via the training task force of the INFRA-EOSC-5 projects.

WP6

Kat reported quite a lot of activities were taking place in WP6 at the moment:

• Survey results for training sent back to WP5;
• SharePoint made easier for reviewers to navigate;
• Ongoing preparations for the interviews to replace the user meeting;
• Ongoing preparations for the ExPaNDS promotional video;
• Updated presentation deck to be finalised for internal review by the end of the week (it is a deliverable due M18);
• Upload to Zenodo of all WP6 deliverables that are not yet there;
• Communication around the RDA session preparation with Brian;
• Librarian symposium preparation with WP2.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Majid, Thibaud, Uwe, Kat

Introduction

Current priorities for ExPaNDS facilities from WP leaders

User meeting: changing the way we engage with users (09/02/2021)

Kat presented the new strategy for the ExPaNDS user meeting deliverable. Instead of a unique event for all users, Isabelle and her suggest to take the opportunity to rethink the format and reach each identified stakeholder individually.

The proposed spectrum of stakeholders was discussed, with suggestions to add e.g. training material creators and technique developers. The point behind this mapping is to know how we are going to engage with each identified stakeholder with a specific use case and/or with specific outreach activities.

As part of the strategy, the engagement with several stakeholder groups will consist of individual interviews with a few very open questions. The questions are being refined.

Facility data policy consultation (09/02/2021)

Abigail presented the set of documents available to guide the individual facility consultations:

• the “thirty elements to consider within a PaN Data Policy Framework” which is a 8-pages summary of the D2.1 deliverable to be sent to the facility policy maker in preparation for the interview(s);
• the “Consultation aims and framing questions” document to guide the actual meeting. The answers to the questions are free-text. These answers need to be sent back to WP2 by the end of April 2021. Abigail encouraged a prompt start because it takes time to reach the right persons and then to meet them.

Alun mentioned some concerns about being able to reach the policy makers at the right level because PSI is under an overarching national ICT infrastructure which is imposing the data policy. Some other concerns were mentioned from HZDR and DESY. It was agreed that in the case where we are unable to concretise a data policy consultation within the duration of ExPaNDS, we should precisely evidence why we didn’t manage to do it.

Andy also shared his recent experience in PaNOSC where he managed to get a written engagement from each facility on the points they will update in their respective policy to make it FAIRer. He mentioned we could also address the people who prepare the data policy-related decisions, and not necessarily directly the ones who will sign them. Andy’s deliverable will be available in a few days, he will share it with us.

The advantages for scientists for an updated data policy were also discussed. For example, showing the policy can enable us to have a better metadata quality and also trigger better references are good incentives. If users are on board, the facilities will follow.

Next priorities in the technical implementations

Daniel presented the result of the recent discussions with Alun and Anton to refocus the efforts in WP4 on partners infrastructure and candidate analysis services. Each facility is to develop, with its infrastructure (1.1 in the following diagram), a containerised scientific use-case (in container or VM or Jupyter Notebook, 1.3) with access to the local data catalogue (1.2).

In the frame of the test framework, this implementation will be tested on the use case (2.1), checking e.g. that results are aligned with the reference results of the pipeline’s reference dataset, and on the infrastructure itself (2.2).

The necessary steps to making this set-up available externally (“EOSCification”, 3) will be developed in parallel, with their own test infrastructure, including security aspects (2.3).

The next steps will be to identify in WP4 (and WP3) the teams to work on these 3 aspects and design a roadmap, with regular checkpoints including, whenever relevant, internal milestones.

Training strategy

In parallel to the workshops already organised (on FAIR), and in planning (on EOSC and possibly on DMPs with EOSC-hub), Thibaud is currently focusing the WP on the training material aggregator. As previously presented, it complements the e-learning platform PaNOSC is updating, in order to make our training materials findable, without additional work needed to onboard them into the Moodle (~1 day additional work for already available content).

With Giuseppe, Oliver and the new person to be recruited for Soleil WP5, this Tess-like platform will be developed in the upcoming months. In an internal WP5 discussion, it was agreed that only registered participants would have the rights to upload material in the aggregator, as a quality assurance measure.

To start populating the platform and to showcase its added value for the PaN communities, Thibaud insisted on the help he needed from each facility to identify existing training material that we could already reference, using the survey created with WP6.

Abigail mentioned the difficulties she was having to collect all the necessary information to complete the survey. One would need to have an overview that is really difficult to get, especially since training is very decentralised in our facilities, often down to the instrument level. An issue will be created. Uwe reminded us it was not the main task for WP5 which was first to create ExPaNDS-specific material but in the meantime it is a nice-to-have with possible high added-value for our facilities.

Review meeting preparation

Picking up on the focus to have ‘containerised’ use cases (see chapter 1.c.), the possibility to have a demo of a data analysis pipeline developed by partner A run on partner B infrastructure with local data, during the review meeting, was discussed. Uwe offered adding a HZDR pipeline running on Jupyter Notebook in the reference datasets (D4.2).

In general to help progress on the review preparation, Alun suggested to start a ‘storyboard’ for the meeting’s demos. Patrick will start it and WP3, WP4 and WP5 will add the technical possibilities. So far we have:

• PaN portal deployed at a NRI with access to data using the search API
• Pipeline developed by partner A running on partner B infrastructure
• Use of PaN-learning to access a NRI tutorial

Status quo per WP

WP1

• Reminder of the upcoming start of the first periodic report - preparing instructions for financial and technical reports
• Finished WP1 and WP2 progress reports - will update all the others for the end of February because we have to do it for the periodic report anyway
• Making use of our GitHub’s features:
• Wiki: adding a public FAQ
• Issues: progressively replacing the issue tracker spreadsheet in SharePoint with individual issues to keep history (and it’s a nice feature)
• Working on mapping activities between ExPaNDS and PaNOSC with Jordi and Patrick - will ask for WP leaders review
• Need to start planning the next CB

WP2

Abigail has now followed up individually, either by email or in separate meetings, with WP2 colleagues who are undertaking consultations in relation to the data policy framework. This was to ensure that the task asked was clear, and also to help with any questions about the consultation process and expected output. An email has also gone out to the list with suggestions of which areas of the facility might need to be involved in the consultation (e.g. user office, legal, computing, etc.).

In the monthly DMP task meeting, we selected a range of use cases for the DMP work. Jonathan and Heike will meet to discuss further before our next monthly meeting.

Abigail is in the process of writing up the report on the task 2.4 PIDs for data best practice sharing meeting. This should be finished in the next day or so, and then will go to the speakers to sense check the write ups of their presentations. After that, it will go out to the WP2 list.

The next task 2.4 workshop on ‘other types of PIDs’ has been deferred until the second half of April. Vasily is working on the content and on contacting potential speakers.

Abigail has completed gathering information from all ExPaNDS facilities about who is responsible for data and publication management at their facilities, and how these two connect (or don’t connect). We have gathered this info to help with the planning of our planned symposium for librarians and data managers.

WP6

• Ongoing work and planning for the new strategy of the ExPaNDS user meeting deliverable to be replaced with ExPaNDS ‘User’ interviews. EC PO justification document / wording sent to WP1 for review.
• Promotion of ESCAPE webinar taking place 17th February at 14:00 GMT / 15:00 CET
• Promotion of WP5 Survey in collaboration with PaNOSC for the PaN Portal training, survey closing date Friday 19th February
• Ongoing planning for the Librarian Symposium with WP2, next meeting scheduled for 5th March 2021
• Review of SharePoint with internal meetings in readiness for Interim Review - this is ongoing. We would welcome any SharePoint feedback from all users, so we can continue to improve the user experience. I.e. access issues, layout suggestions, content review.

AOB

• Next joint PaNOSC / ExPaNDS Symposium to be discussed - PF / SS / KR

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Majid, Nazaré, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Giuseppe, Andrei, Ants, Brigitte

Introduction

This PEB was extended to all ExPaNDS facilities to get an overview of each partner’s status and a common agreement on the review meeting preparation. Patrick introduced summarising the current focus of the project:

• The revamped user meeting currently planned by WP6, targeting each stakeholder more precisely and involving all facilities communication teams;
• The consultation on the data policy framework currently carried out by WP2, where we need to monitor more closely the progress and status for each facility;
• The current technical discussions between TC, WP3 and WP4 to refocus the efforts on partners infrastructure and candidate analysis services, where we also need to monitor more closely the status of each facility.

Review meeting preparation

A first draft review meeting agenda was discussed:

1. Overview of the project and introduction of the scientific use case
2. WP reports
   Each WP reporting on their highlights. A detailed report will be made available in parallel to justify the compliance with the description of work, which is the reviewers’ main tool to judge the project.
3. Illustration with a scientific use case
   This last session should make very clear the link between the science and the technologies we are implementing. Gaps are possible at this point but we should already give a concrete picture of what we are trying to achieve.

Alun showed the progress he made with Isabelle and Kat on the possible use cases, and reported on their meeting with EOSC-Life.

It was agreed that regular meetings would now be planned to focus on the review meeting preparation. A draft Indico event was set up by Sophie. A rehearsal will be planned before the actual review, where the CB members will be invited. The possibility to make it open to everyone was also suggested.

Report from each facility on status

Each facility then provided an update of their status and concerns.

ALBA

• Thanks to the new starter (Enric) in January, ALBA is on track with its budget;
• In the upcoming challenges, the data policy update needs to be addressed;
• There are difficulties with the portal deployment but nothing blocking.

DESY

• Overarching data policy at DESY has been rejected, but the directors are getting more and more aware of the topic (Frank and Patrick working on it);
• For data catalogues, DESY is a bit behind but Patrick reported Frank is envisioning to have a SciCat linked with CXIDB (see annual meeting);
• DESY WP4 is now refocusing on existing data analysis services, and a bit less on the portal deployment, which is better for the short-term objectives;
• DESY is still underspending for WP4 but discussions are planned internally;
• On the other WPs, DESY is on track with its budget.

Diamond

• Covid is still drawing away resources: on top of recruitment issues, Diamond is facing onboarding problems, with new people leaving. This situation needs to be properly monitored in the risk assessment (WP1);
• WP3 and 4 need more leadership internally, WP6 is doing very well;

EGI

• The current ExPaNDS team (Andrea and Giuseppe) will be further strengthened by a new recruit;
• EGI is just starting to get involved in WP3, where the new recruit will be most active;
• Andrea is mostly involved in WP4 and working on the upcoming deliverable with Anton;
• For WP1, to follow-up on Diego’s presentation of the onboarding procedure to EOSC, EGI will organise a workshop on EOSC for ExPaNDS;
• For WP5, EGI is attending the meetings regularly.

Elettra

• Difficulties to connect to beamline scientists on data management to materialise WP2 progress;
• For WP3 and WP4, Elettra is testing the search API and deployment of the portal.

HZB

• The current team (Rolf and Heike) will be further strengthened by a new recruit to replace Corina, the interviews are ongoing;
• HZB is well involved in WP2, notably on DMPs tasks;
• HZB is also involved in the WP3 search API and ontology;
• The data policy was adopted in 2016 at HZB, the technical implementation is still under way. Ants confirmed his management was supporting these topics.

HZDR

• Oliver is dedicated to ExPaNDS, making HZDR on track with its budget;
• HZDR’s data policy is applicable since 2018;
• HZDR participated in WP2 surveys, presented at the DOI workshop and participated in the review of deliverables (in-kind);
• For WP4: defined reference datasets, worked on federated AAI, portal and use cases;
• For WP5: Uwe suggested having an extra document explaining the intermediate results for the e-learning platform because the deliverable only comes later on. HZDR will participate in the upcoming TtT workshop;
• Concerns:
  • PaNOSC WP4 and WP8 portals developments are slow;
  • Material offered in the e-learning platform needs to be better balanced between photon and neutron;
  • Convincing beamline scientists to be engaged, even when there is a policy, remains a challenge.

MAX IV (off-meeting)

• A new person, Linh, replaced Muhammad for WP3 and has started very well;
• In WP4 only Zdenek dedicates time for ExPaNDS and needs reinforcement but 2 consecutive recruitments failed - situation to be monitored;
• Some internal help from IT on setting up the infrastructure for WP4;
• MAX IV would like a bit more ‘organisation’ and 'charting the course' within ExPaNDS to clarify how WP3 is managed between ExPaNDS and PaNOSC;
• At the moment, struggling to fully understand EOSC and the various infrastructure connected to it, working on piecing it together for the upcoming WP3 task of ‘integrate to EOSC’;
• WP3 and WP4 not talking enough, possibly there are disconnections inside MAX IV between groups as well;
• A foreseen risk is the lack of endorsement of ExPaNDS by management and scientists. This is improving from the management side but it will take time for scientists to take up on it.

PSI

• The PSI team is complete with Krisztian, Carlo and Alun mainly, Stephan and Leo indirectly contributing also;
• Alun is satisfied with the integration of his new starters and is confident with WP3 and WP4 progress. Some difficulties remaining for WP1 and WP2, not made easier by the ongoing work for the facility upgrade;
• On the technical level, WP3 is ‘reactionary’ but Carlo is helping. SciCat is not accessible from outside and there are technical difficulties to address it but work is in progress;
• WP4, thanks to recent discussions with Daniel and Anton, is getting much better. There are remaining difficulties due to the PSI situation that computing is far from the scientists;
• The data policy update is complicated but Alun is aware he has to push.

SOLEIL

• The data policy was adopted in 2018 and it is being implemented; Soleil was hoping ExPaNDS would help with it and also with the catalogue implementation (SciCat) but it is not yet the case;
• Difficulties linked to the fact that ExPaNDS Soleil team is not in direct contact to scientists;
• Recruitment for WP4 still has not succeeded, Majid is concerned, especially for the task SOLEIL is leading. Parallel discussions are ongoing with WP1 to try and solve this.

UKRI

• WP2 is on track with Abigail working full time and a new person to help in the task on PIDs (Vasily);
• in WP3, Alejandra and Stuart are helping on the ICAT API and on the ontology, Brian mentioned they would like to do more but don't have the effort;
• ISIS contributors (Anders, Franz) are focusing on WP4, where it is going ok but is a bit slow.

Current priorities for ExPaNDS facilities from WP leaders

This section was adjourned to a follow-up meeting dedicated to the preparation of the use case for the review.

Status quo per WP

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Silvia, Anton, Majid, Thibaud, Uwe, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Patrick received feedback from PaNOSC WP6 on the common PaN ESCAPE workshop on data management. They said it was an interesting meeting which provided useful information but that it would need too much effort to adopt the ESCAPE data lake as a solution for PaN data management. Jean-François will write a summary to explain this decision and give perspectives.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie reported that our PO asked for a dedicated review meeting to assess the collaboration between the 5b projects. It will happen as a separate event soon after/before our own review meeting. The EOSC secretariat project, which used to be our gateway to the EOSC WGs and is now the one to the EOSC association, will end in June 2021. After that, the stakeholder’s forum of the EOSC Association should take over this role but there will probably be a “moment of hesitation” between the two where we will need to organise ourselves for the task forces (FAIR, training and comms in particular).

Reviewing the project DMP with Jordi, Sophie asked if we should change the clause saying we will put every deliverable in Zenodo. We could instead choose to use Zenodo only for those deliverables that should be findable after ExPaNDS ends. It was decided that we should keep it as it is, it is not up to us to decide what is interesting or not to the wider community. Sophie will upload all missing public deliverables to Zenodo.

Preparing for the review, Sophie suggested we offer access to the Sharepoint to our reviewer. A dedicated meeting will be planned with Kat, Patrick and Alun (Diamond’s SharePoint expert) to see how we can make the most important documents accessible in one-click from the homepage.

WP2

Brian reported the task on PIDs was kicked-off with presentations from a colleague involved in the FREYA project and one from Rolf. The next steps will be two-fold: meetings among experts to work on the PID infrastructure for ExPaNDS and meetings for a larger audience to share best practices at our facilities. A meeting is scheduled for next week with several facilities (including HZB, PSI, ISIS and ESRF) presenting their PID policy and implementation.

WP2 needs to follow-up on the facilities data policy consultation. Abigail and Brian are currently in touch with ISIS on the subject. The possibility to apply to the FAIRsFAIR call for policy enhancement support was relayed to partners and will be further discussed.

Abigail informed us she would be presenting our metadata framework to the other 5b projects at the FAIR task force meeting next Tuesday.

On the uptake of FAIR, the event for librarians is being prepared, Abigail currently investigating who is managing the data and how in the different partner facilities. Brian also mentioned he was still planning to have a PaNSIG session during the upcoming RDA event in Edinburgh.

WP3

Sylvie asked for clarifications on what was precisely expected in ExPaNDS DoW (description of work) for the implementation deliverable called “Release V1.0 ExPaNDS ontology available as an EOSC online service”. A dedicated meeting will be held to clarify this with Patrick and Sophie.

Sylvie reported having successfully uploaded a draft ExPaNDS ontology in Bioportal. The PIDs to be used are still to be discussed. WP3 is working with NIAC to try and integrate in the NeXus terms the PaN ontology for the 1st classes. A demonstrator will be presented in the course of the next NIAC meetings.

Followed a discussion on the importance of having users check the usability of the ontologies in the long term. In particular, the structure of the ontology needs to easily accommodate changes for it to be sustainable.

WP5

Thibaud confirmed his open position at SOLEIL would work on implementing the Tess-like aggregator of training material, in the team of Emmanuel Fahri. The ontology developed in WP3 will be used for the platform, to add metadata to the linked training content.

Abigail and Thibaud met to discuss in more depth possible content and expectations for WP2 and STFC on training. The aggregator of content will be specifically interesting for FAIR-related content and Abigail mentioned the sub-site of the training platform for STFC could even be adopted for a wider use.
The more general survey on training material aimed at all partners is being finalised with Kat.

Thibaud also encouraged each facility to participate in the Train-the-trainers workshop organised by PaNOSC (9-11 of February).

WP6

In the previous weeks, Kat added new pages to the expands.eu website: related projects, deliverables, a resources section with infographics, videos and recorded presentations. She encouraged everyone to provide feedback.

As part of the development of the new strategy for the user meeting deliverable “package”, Kat reported an EOSC-life meeting with Susan Daenke, progress on the preparation of the librarian meeting (see WP2) and the upcoming meeting with facilities communication teams. The latter has, among others, the goal to identify high-profile scientists in each facility for possible interviews on their requirements and use cases for ExPaNDS.

Finally Kat was happy to report a good attendance to the PaN ESCAPE data lake workshop and a very good feedback in the first answers to the post event survey.

AOB

Andy reported there were already 7 use cases published in panosc.eu and reminded of the possibility for everyone to upload their own use cases. PaNOSC is aiming to have 10 use cases per facility.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Majid, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

The common ESCAPE-PaNOSC workshop on data management facilitated by Patrick and Kat is planned for the 12th of January, the program will be sent as soon as we receive the final input from Jean-François (PaNOSC WP6). The workshop will focus specifically on the data lake concept.

Thanks to the different input received, Patrick reported that Rudolf managed to put together a satisfactory update for PaN in the new version of the EOSC Future proposal.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie asked for the PEB’s support for the financial report due for the end of the year, to make sure the finance teams of the remaining facilities were aware of the request and ready to deliver.

The progress reports for WP2 and WP4 need to be updated in January. Sophie will come back to the WP leaders with the draft report and will ask for a 1-hour face-to-face to discuss overall progress on all tasks and next steps, with Patrick and Daniel.

Next year, WP1 is planning to involve EGI more, especially with the preparation of the upcoming workshop on EOSC.

Daniel announced that his recruitment went through, with a newcomer starting on the 11th of January for ALBA WP2-3-4.

WP2

Brian was happy to confirm the delivery of the draft recommendations for FAIR PaN data management (D2.2). This document triggered complicated discussions which we managed to transform into a very interesting result. The hard work of each contributor was praised and the document’s quality was confirmed also by Patrick.

For the start of the next task on DMPs, Brian confirmed Jon from PaNOSC will be involved. For the start of the task on PIDs, WP3 will also be involved (see WP3 chapter).

Brian reminded of the importance for WP2 of the consultation exercise with the facilities on the data policies in 2021, which will be complemented by a specific event targeted to librarians and data policy facility staff, organised jointly with WP6.

Finally Brian mentioned the upcoming RDA meeting in April 2021 in Edinburgh (and remotely), where he is planning to get the PaN SIG revived. He discussed with Andy, who was interested to jointly submit a paper on FAIR data practices for facilities. The deadline is the 12th of January. For the paper we need to involve at least one facility outside of Europe, for which any suggestion from the PEB is welcome. The network of lightsources.org will also be used, thanks to WP6.

WP3

PaNOSC and ExPaNDS both have deliverables around the same time in the first quarter of 2021: a working federated search (PaNOSC) and a first PaN ontology (ExPaNDS). Alun reported they worked on making the two deliverables feed into each other and allow parallel work.

There is a sub-group in WP3 led by Steve Collins dedicated to ontology. He has a PhD student working on experimental techniques, who will be presenting his works to WP3 at the beginning of the new year. Sylvie added that they were working to turn the ontology, which is currently a NeXus spreadsheet, into a service: an actual repository with e.g. terms of use.

Alun also mentioned MAX IV reaching out to ask our community for implementation practices for DOIs. It was decided that the interested WP3 contributors would be invited to the first PID meeting of WP2 (on the 14th Jan), where the overall PID scene will be set. This will then allow for another meeting to follow-up more specifically on DOIs implementation.

WP4

Anton reminded WP4 focused on the portal deployment at DESY, working very closely with PaNOSC/XFEL. Patrick drew Andy’s attention to the issue about ILL not developing the portal on Kubernetes but only on VMs. A solution will need to be found with PaNOSC, it is starting to be complicated to go further with the deployment.

Patrick also reported the 2 hands-on sessions on the portal deployment at DESY provided by Michael, which attracted over 40 participants from our different facilities. Anton confirmed it was interesting sessions that encouraged him to develop more CI/CD pipelines and that it will probably require a follow-up.

Patrick also mentioned the issue between EGI check-in (the AAI for our federated cloud) and EduTeams (umbrella ID, the PaN AAI) who are not agreeing. A situation we need to keep an eye on.

WP5

Thibaud will soon distribute the survey on training needs and material to all ExPaNDS facilities, with WP6’s help.

Thibaud also managed to get ExPaNDS a 10-minutes-presentation during Soleil’s user meeting (SU²). He suggested Patrick as a presenter, who agreed.

The first discussions with DANS regarding the workshop on DMPs, to be offered to ExPaNDS by EOSC-hub took place last Friday. The event itself will happen before the end of March 2021 and a first draft programme will be distributed by DANS to both WP2 and WP5 for feedback. We agreed this was an introductory training workshop on DMPs but that we will need an additional specific ExPaNDS workshop once the developments in the task on DMPs will be available (~end of 2021).

PaNOSC is planning to have its “train the trainers” workshop to learn how to add content in the e-learning platform in February or March (the invitation will be distributed soon). It will be limited to 30 participants, Thibaud encouraged interested parties to register.

Finally, Thibaud reported Soleil was in the process of hiring someone for WP5 to work on the portal, also because Nazaré will be leaving the project as soon as the end of February.

WP6

Isabelle reported an upcoming update of the website with the videos of our recent events this week.

The roadmap due this month is progressing well and was already reviewed with WP1 and WP2. Three more meetings are planned this week to discuss it with WP3, 4 and 5 before delivering to the Commission.

A monthly meeting will now take place with PaNOSC comms, with an additional one-on-one catch-up every two weeks between Nicoletta and Kat.

The meeting with the comm-teams from every RI, using the network of communicators developed by WP6, is being planned for the 1st half of January.

In January also, Isabelle reported WP6 would follow-up on the internal survey mentioned during the annual meeting for the project to give feedback to the dissemination strategy.

As drafted in the roadmap, Isabelle finally stressed the two next major events to be organised:

• the outreach event with librarians and data policy staff of our facilities, jointly with WP2,
• the user meeting event with EOSC-Life, focused on a life-science use case - our ‘quick-win’ use case - to be held before the review meeting, jointly with WP3, WP4 and EOSC-Life.

AOB

Sophie mentioned the DESY Photon Science and XFEL user meeting, taking place from the 25th to the 29th of January. Anton is leading a satellite meeting on data and metadata for PETRA III which will be of interest to WP3.

We need to start thinking of an ExPaNDS site to suggest to PaNOSC for our next annual meeting.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

ExPaNDS, contrary to PaNOSC, doesn't have any efforts in important areas like AAI and data management (data transfer, data orchestration, quality of storage). However, Patrick stressed that those topics are also important for our facilities. Therefore he asked to point him to ExPaNDS contributors who would be interested in the work of PaNOSC/WP6 (actively or passively), subscribing to the WP6/PaNOSC mailing list, connecting to their slack channel and joining their meetings.
It would also be an opportunity to work with ESCAPE and its data lake concept, something we should keep an eye on. Alun noted that we were almost all connected to national initiatives that are usually providing data management solutions but Patrick said it was not necessarily enough to cover transnational issues. Data management is essential for the A in FAIR. Isabelle suggested suitable contacts for Diamond.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie confirmed the amendment request had been accepted by the EC and that our PO mentioned we did an exhaustive work that “made his task easy”. The new deadlines for deliverables and milestones are now updated accordingly in SharePoint and GitHub.

Following the annual meeting, Jordi, Valentina and Sophie updated together the risk analysis for ExPaNDS, that is now delivered to the EC. During the discussions we realised that in PaNOSC they have all facilities represented at their PMC (our PEB) which sometimes makes their life easier. Sophie asked the PEB about the idea to have an extended-version of the PEB once in a while where all facilities would be represented. The PEB agreed and decided to give it a try for the meeting scheduled on the 19th of January 2021. Sophie will contact the CB members of the missing facilities to ask for a representative.

Kat also suggested to send the link to the PEB minutes to all@expands.eu to remind everyone they were available for them to follow ExPaNDS developments.

WP2

Abigail reported that the FAIR data management deliverable was currently being internally reviewed with a deadline for reviewers set to the 3rd of December (this Thursday) EOB. Daniel will organise a follow-up meeting to finalise the document with the group once all reviews are gathered.

Abigail also mentioned the necessity to have senior management participate in the data policy consultations at every facility and that meetings with them should be booked soon to progress on this task. She asked for some advice on the right contact persons at the facilities not directly involved in WP2.

WP2’s DMP and PID tasks will officially be kicked-off in January with planned meetings on the 7th and the 14th.

Sophie reported on last week’s 5b task force on FAIR assessment tools where EC representative were present, including Christian. ExPaNDS had a 5-min lightning talk where she presented how the key elements of the data policy framework were used for facilities consultations and the first assessment of the FAIR maturity of our data catalogues with the D3.1 deliverable.
FAIRsFAIR is adding a FAIR layer to the CoreTrustSeal certification of data repositories with an automatic assessment tool called F-UJI. It is developed using the criteria of RDA’s FAIR Maturity Model. We should look at it for our data catalogues. It is however only a general-purpose assessment and of course does not cover the PaN-specific aspects to qualify the metadata as ‘rich enough’.

Finally, Abigail pointed to the publication of UNESCO draft recommendations on open science, linking it to the human rights, a paper that is having a wide echo in the community right now. The draft is open to feedback until the 31th of December 2020 and Abigail wondered whether we should try and send an ExPaNDS feedback.

WP3

Alun reported WP3 now focused on the ontology deliverable due end of May 2021 and lead by Diamond. He also confirmed the assessment of the individual progress towards FAIR data catalogues presented in the status and roadmap deliverable (D3.1) was indeed to be used as a WP3 KPI. Sophie and Alun agreed to have the quotation presented on a 100 basis (instead of 10) and updated ~ every 6 months.

WP4

Anton reported that last WP4 meeting focused on the upcoming deliverable 4.1 “Guidelines for implementing the national RI’s analysis services within the EOSC”, which was discussed and started.

In parallel, the test instances of the portal continue being prepared, in particular with DESY and XFEL working together on the subject. Patrick mentioned XFEL was considering having the PaN portal as part of the official XFEL infrastructure, thus greatly increasing the chances to have it sustained after the projects end.

Anton also noted that the integration of the data catalogues, i.e. the interface with WP3 needed to be addressed. Alun mentioned WP3 was participating in the PaNOSC WP4 meetings to keep an eye on it.

WP6

Isabelle stressed that the upcoming focus of WP6 would be on the roadmap deliverable due by the end of the year and on the user meeting to be organised before the end of February 2021. To progress on both, Kat will send invitations to each WP leader before the holidays to gather their input.

Following one of Daniel’s suggestion during the annual meeting, Isabelle is also looking at how to connect on a more regular face-to-face basis with local communication teams at partner facilities.

Kat mentioned the training workshop on FAIR recordings and survey results would be made available soon.

AOB

Before the meeting, Andy updated Sophie on the form for scientists to autonomously upload use cases which is in preparation in the PaNOSC website. It will use the template for use cases presented by the coordinators during the annual meeting.

Sophie also reminded of the plan for a common EOSC-hub/ExPaNDS workshop on DMPs, with a preparatory meeting scheduled probably for the 11th of December (to be confirmed by DANS).

Kat mentioned that during the 5b task force on communication, FAIRsFAIR was keen to do another FAIR workshop with ExPaNDS. This will be followed-up by the training TF. Abigail confirmed she was in regular contact with FAIRsFAIR’s contributors at STFC.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Majid, Nazaré, Kat

Introduction

Feedback on the annual meeting

Overall the PEB was very happy with the annual meeting, it was well organised and reached its goal to provide an overview of both projects common and extra works.

For the symposium, the talks on FAIR were particularly appreciated, giving a glimpse on how others are doing it. On a more practical note, the sessions were a bit too long, with only one short break in 4 hours. It is good that the symposium was recorded, some mentioned having missed a few parts because of that. A note on the webinar mode, it is a bit frustating not to be able to tell who was attending.
Off meeting: when registering, the consent to appear in a list of participants with name and institute was included, so we can upload the final list of participants in SharePoint.

For the annual meeting itself, it was very much appreciated to hear and understand what WPs in both projects are doing, notably regarding sustainability, FAIR, data transfer and simulations (where both projects are the most different). It was also a good opportunity to pass on messages to everyone, especially for WP5.

The fact that WPs leaders from both projects presented together was seen as very useful, with a structure that was always the same, making the whole event comprehensible and consistent.

It was mentioned that Michael’s demo for the WP4s was very impressive. It was mentioned that we now need to get forward and have more and more tangible results, stressing the importance of WP4. In this regard the ‘low-hanging fruit’ or better said ‘quick-win’ strategy was seen as a good move for the upcoming months (see also CB minutes).

In the Zoom ‘meeting mode’ for the two annual meeting days, the chat was a bit disruptive with lots of parallel discussions while people were presenting. At the same time it was good to see people interacting, and not only WP leaders talking among themselves. Overall, informal and smaller-group interaction was of course very much missed. Maybe breakout rooms could be envisaged for future meetings, to give the opportunity to hear other voices and have more side-discussions.

Finally the 20 minutes presentation + 20 minutes discussion with 10 min buffer time before the next talk was a very good format, allowing some flexibility and reasonable time for exchange. However it was again perceived to be a bit long, maybe spreading over 3 days instead of 2 could be considered.

Plans for the mid-term review

Our next big milestone is the project’s mid-term review, that should be scheduled by the European Commission between March and April 2021. The plan for this would be to tell a story linking WP2, 3, 4 and 5 with a use case and demos wherever possible. Patrick encouraged the WP leaders and the TC to start thinking about it.

Status quo per WP

WP2

The FAIR data management deliverable due by the end of November (D2.2) is almost ready for internal review. It was agreed that Daniel would share it this week to Patrick, Sophie, Brian and Andy.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Valentina, Alun, Anton, Majid, Kat

Introduction

Preparation of the annual meeting

Use cases

Patrick and Andy’s presentation at the annual meeting will highlight our 2 projects through use cases. 3 possible use cases for ExPaNDS were identified:

• the team who measured for the first time a process that lies within the realm of zeptoseconds using DESY´s PETRA III,
• Anton’s article in Nature on megahertz serial crystallography measured at XFEL but processed and stored at DESY,
• Diamond’s article in Nature on X-ray crystallography of molecules fragments binding to the main protease of SARS-CoV-2 for which the data was made available in Zenodo.

WP presentations

The timeline and objective of the WP sessions was discussed. With a basis of 20 minutes presentation + 20 minutes discussion, it is useful to think in advance about how to steer the discussion in case it doesn’t naturally occur.

Anton confirmed he was chasing his counterpart for the common WP4 presentation. Alun showed the outline that he discussed with Tobias for the WP3 one.

ExPaNDS user meeting

It was agreed we would focus on this after the annual meeting.

Status quo per WP

WP3

Patrick gave some feedback on the D3.1 deliverable on status and roadmap which Alun submitted to internal review last Monday. Sophie will send some more detailed feedback asap for a final version to be submitted to the EU at the end of the month.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Majid, Nazaré, Thibaud, Isabelle, Andy

Introduction

Patrick and Sophie met our new Project Officer, Pilar Ocon, who made a really good impression on us. Both her and Christian are coming to our annual meeting, Christian agreeing on making a short presentation on EOSC and Horizon Europe. She expressed the need for our project to, while working very collaboratively with PaNOSC, always keep precise track of who is doing what. She encouraged us to have a document mapping the activities of both projects in a very clear manner for our future reviewers. Jordi had already mentioned the idea to Sophie so WP1s will take this action, along with both coordinators. Patrick and Andy will also meet to prepare the coordinator’s session of the annual meeting where this complementarity will be approached.

The technical workshop on the portal deployement took place last week and was in our opinion very successful. The next steps and actions for the portal were discussed:

• Patrick is taking care of making a channel available for developers to remain in contact.
• First we need to make people aware of the developments and steer the overall direction of the portal and then engage real users.
• As a principle, PaNOSC develops, ExPaNDS deploys (see also WP4 update).

Abigail wondered about FAIR and WP4, since it was never mentioned in the presentations. Daniel confirmed that FAIR was like security a few years ago, people need to start thinking about it during conception, not afterwards. This will be discussed further, maybe there is something to do on the discoverability of services at least.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie is starting to prepare the WP1² session on management for the annual meeting with Jordi. Valentina is also in contact with Ornella for the joint WP1/WP7 session on sustainability.

Some progress was made on the amendment, which already made an iteration with the PO(s). A direct consequence of the extension is that we now have reporting periods longer than 18 months (21). This automatically triggers new reports for finances, we will have to report in December every year of the cumulative expenditure. Sophie will consequently need to request this to our finance people as soon as next month.

Finally Sophie reported that our 75 min session for the EGI conference had been accepted and that she was going to quickly start steering the preparation because we only have three weeks left.

WP2

WP2 delivered its two FAIR workshops on 1st and 2nd October. Roughly 100 people attended both sessions, representing a good spread of roles across instrument scientist, computing staff, other facility staff, and senior management.
The presentations raised some interesting questions from the audience. We await feedback from the post-workshop survey, and the workshop recordings will go up on the ExPaNDS website in the coming weeks, as will responses to the questions we could not answer live. Abigail thanked again Kat, Emily, WP6, and all of the presenters!

Work also continues on FAIR data management (D2.2). The structure of the deliverable is now well-developed and WP2 aims to have the content mostly complete by end of October in preparation for internal review.

Abigail also reported we are considering how best to proceed with the glossary work started over the summer. Related to it, Abigail sent feedback on the EOSC glossary with the result that several suggested changes have been accepted and will be incorporated into the next release of the document.

WP3

WP3’s upcoming deliverable is being finalised by the different WP3 contributors with the objective of submitting it to internal review by Monday next week.

WP4

Following the technical workshop and the last WP4 meeting, Patrick reported that it was decided to have a continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) testing platform for the portal hosted by DESY and MAX IV, in order to provide two different testing environments to all partners, avoiding local bias.
DESY is also working to make the ExPaNDS reference datasets available in a dCache instance.

Anton confirmed he would be present at the annual meeting now that it was virtual and will discuss with Andy and Patrick the preparation for the WP4² session.

WP5

Nazaré and Thibaud presented the last developments on the training strategy for both projects (see appendix). There will be three components to the online training:

• the e-learning platform that will enable the creation of new content and the use of, e.g. Jupyter Notebooks,
• a training library, referencing all external training content of interest for the PaN community, following Elixir’s training platform model,
• an event library, referencing all training events of interest to the PaN community.

In terms of architecture it would be less centralised hence more sustainable and it also will add visibility to existing material. This will enable to gather interesting and targeted information for our PaN community.

The next steps for this task will be to identify:

• the training needs for each WP,
• the existing material at our facilities that could be retrieved,
• the planned material to be produced for ExPaNDS.

Nazaré and Thibaud are also working on the WP5/WP8 common presentation with PaNOSC at the annual meeting where this strategy and the responsibilities of each project will be highlighted.

WP6

WP6 helped a lot with the dissemination and facilitation of the WP2 and technical workshops, all confirmed they were really happy.

Isabelle also reported the recent work on the justification for the ‘reference from community websites’ milestone and agreed to send it asap to Sophie for an upload to the EU portal this week.

Isabelle is also meeting Nicoletta to prepare the WP6/WP9 annual meeting session. She finally reminded WP6 had two important deliverables upcoming: the roadmap and the user meeting.

AOB

Hans is leaving XFEL and PaNOSC.

Appendix

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Uwe, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Our PO regards the reasoning for our project extension request and the new milestone and deliverable layout as consistent and suggests to go ahead with the amendment process. Christian further informed Patrick that he will step down as our PO. Our new PO will be Pilar Ocon-Garces. She now manages all 5B's. However, Christian will accompany the amendment process and will still be the ExPaNDS backup PO in the future.

In preparation of the ESFRI-EOSC workshop on 6-7th of Oct, Patrick inquired on horizontal infrastructures usage by ExPaNDS facilities. Brian mentioned that UKRI, as DESY, is linked 3rd party for PaNOSC through EGI, and has some involvement with WLCG, investigating fts, Rucio and CBM FS. There is also Géant’s EduTeams which we are all using for federated AAI.

Patrick also confirmed that both EOSC-Future and EOSC-ACE (INFRA-EOSC 03 and 07 H2020 calls) were accepted.

Status quo per WP

WP1

As Patrick mentioned, Sophie will start working on the actual amendment process in the EU portal now that the PO gave the green light.

ExPaNDs was contacted by F1000 research about the Open Research Europe (ORE) which is an open access platform financed by the European Commission. We could publish papers there and organise peer-review without any editorial bias. Sophie will get in touch for details, with Abigail, Kat and Patrick in the loop.

WP2

The finishing touches are being put on the upcoming workshop on FAIR. There is over 100 registered participants now!

With the data policy framework published, WP2 is focusing on D2.2, FAIR data management. Brian mentioned last week’s useful discussion with Alun and Andy to coordinate D2.2 with WP3 and with PaNOSC.

WP3

Alun and Sylvie received some input from partners for the landscape, to refresh the results from the questionnaire from Dec. 2019. The deliverable is progressing, including the resolved synergy with WP2 (see above).

Sylvie will upload the new version of the ontology to GitHub this Friday.

Sophie asked whether we could put the results of the WP3 survey to beamline scientists in the form of a ‘user story’ so we can better showcase it with our partner projects in the 5b and EOSC secretariat. Sophie is to send deadline and guidelines to Sylvie, as well as the link to the Interest Group on use cases.

WP4

Patrick mentioned that Michael was preparing for the technical meeting, linking DESY’s Jupyter and Kubernetes to the portal’s back-end.

There are many questions on WP4 that hopefully the technical meeting will help answer.

WP5

Uwe reported WP5 was still evaluating portals for the e-learning platform. Existing portals are not very flexible in terms of customisation or to add content from different sources. We need to link to an existing platform because we don’t have enough content as only ExPaNDS and PaNOSC, and it is also more sustainable.

There will also be training in EOSC-Future with DESY as task leader, so some complementarities to ExPaNDS and PaNOSC could be found.

WP6

Kat was very successful in disseminating the two upcoming events for ExPaNDS, for which we have more registrants than expected:

• WP2 workshop on FAIR: 101 registrants for day 1 and 85 for day 2, with a notable exposure via NFFA-EU, who relayed the information on their channel. Alun wondered if it was worth also going to the CPP4 where lots of beamline people were. Brian will consider it.
• Daniel’s technical workshop: 76 registrants.

Kat also reported she was tracking the registrants’ background for WP5 KPIs. Abigail inquired if there were other KPI requirements coming from WP1, for the post-event survey for example. Sophie confirmed there was no other need than WP5’s.

The invitation to register to the ExPaNDS/PaNOSC annual meeting was also launched on different channels (EOSC liaison platform, Twitter, LinkedIn, expands.eu) and Kat will notify all@expands.eu in the following days.

AOB

Abigail mentioned the chair of the 5B projects task force on FAIR was wondering if she could remove the ‘silent members’ of the TF, that is Patrick, Brian and Sophie and only keep the ‘active’ ones, that is Abigail. If it is not a bother, all three would like to remain in the channel to keep up-to-date with the activities of this TF.

Andy’s presentation of PaNOSC (and ExPaNDS) at ESS-ILL user meeting was uploaded in SharePoint, it is worth a look.

🙋 Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Silvia, Majid, Thibaud, Kat

Introduction

The extension request is following its process, the paper we all agreed on is being reviewed by the PO with a foreseen answer by the end of September. For now the reference for deadlines of milestones and deliverables remain unchanged.

Status quo per WP

WP1

A common response to the SRIA is being written with PaNOSC with the aim to publish it this week. Sophie will keep the PEB informed on any additional point compared to our already submitted response. The idea is to stress the key points so they are not missed in the wrap-up the EOSC secretariat is preparing. They received ~260 responses.

Sophie is working on the financial situation of the project post-extension, to monitor the updated ramp-up. She will contact facilities separately with an overview of the current expenses and projections per partner.

WP2

The data policy framework is being finalised by Brian, taking in the last comments made by internal reviewers. The final version is to be uploaded and made public by the end of this week. Now the focus for the next two months will be on FAIR data management (D2.2), for which the general features and purpose are agreed upon.

Concerning the upcoming workshop on FAIR, Daniel and Abigail are to meet separately to prepare their talks.

For task 2.2, Heike is trying to participate to PaNOSC meetings on DMPs but it is hard to keep up, having in parallel the ExPaNDS meetings, where PaNOSC is not attending. Brian will talk with Andy to better coordinate the common works within the two WP2s.

WP3

WP3 is progressing on the D3.1 deliverable, Sylvia reported that the December landscape was sent to facilities for update, with a deadline by Friday. The gap analysis and roadmap will then be finalised and sent for facility review before the end of the month.

In parallel, task 3.2 carries on with the shared meetings with PaNOSC on experimental techniques, the work-in-progress ontology will be uploaded to GitHub WP3.

The new starter at PSI will be taking up the implementation task (task 3.3) when he arrives mid Oct.

Tobias presented metadata at ExPaNDS and PaNOSC during the Workshop on Metadata catalogues integration for Interdisciplinary Research of FAIRsFAIR (11th of Sept) with the clusters (PaNOSC, EOSC-Life, ENVRIFAIR, SSHOC and ESCAPE). B2FIND was also presented and all material can be found here.

WP4

Majid reported last meeting discussions were about the current portal tests, and they introduced the topic of AAI for external users. EGI will try and come up with a proposal for next meeting.

The new recruit at MAX IV due to start in ~Nov will be responsible for the testing framework.

WP5

Thibaud had a very fruitful meeting with LEAPS last week who were really interested by the training platform that they are willing to take over after the projects end, making it sustainable. LEAPS facilities also have scientific material that they could provide already. LENS will be contacted by PaNOSC to be integrated in this.

Thibaud is also coordinating with Cecilia Blasetti for users outreach and is now in the WP5 and WP6 mailing lists of LEAPS.

Together with PaNOSC, Thibaud will meet with the Elixir platform on the 21st, and had an internal meeting this morning to prepare it.

Finally, monthly meetings will now be set between WP5 and WP2-3-4 to talk about training material and define the requirements for the platform. Thibaud asked whether WP leaders would rather have separate WP meetings or only common ones. WP2 was in favour of common meetings. WP3 and 4 are to confirm. Kat offered help with the templates for training material, Thibaud is to send his requirements.

WP6

Kat disseminated on the upcoming WP2 workshop:

• to all ExPaNDS and PaNOSC contributors (mailing lists)
• to LEAPS mailing list
• via social media
• it will appear in this week’s newsletter of lightsources.org
• the heads of communication at EU PaN facilities will be contacted this afternoon for dissemination in each facility
• and finally she is waiting for feedback from LENS.

There are already ~30 registrants to both days.

Kat also shared the update on the Technical workshop which, as Daniel sent, will now be spread over 2 afternoons (8th and 9th of Oct) and will integrate a 2h session on Calipsoplus, to share the experience on this closely related finishing project. There are 56 registrants to this event now.

Kat also mentioned the SOLARIS user meeting she attended with Sophie last week, we had a poster session where 13 people apparently attended but we saw only one... There were 13 views on the video and the poster so that’s already something.

An updated version of the expands.eu website with a related projects page featuring PaNOSC, LEAPS, etc is coming up soon!

Finally, Kat will also pick up the weekly WP catch-ups.

AOB

WP2 reported they had not been properly consulted for the DOI video and letter to be addressed to scientific journals in the name of ExPaNDS, PaNOSC, LEAPS and LENS. They had some concerns on the content that they would have liked to be able to share before the dissemination. Sophie confirmed the approval only came from each facility (e.g. Sara Fletcher for UKRI) so we took it for granted that is was agreed by ExPaNDS. We’ll be more careful in the future.

Writing the first WP2 deliverable, Abigail had feedback on the document templates available in SharePoint which she will send to Kat. As suggested by Andrei and for more interoperability, Sophie will also put .odt versions of the different templates.

Concerning the point raised by Andrei on the proprietary fonts on our ExPaNDS logo, Kat is reviewing it with legal but apparently there is no problem since we are not sharing the actual font files in the CC licenced documents we produce.

Sylvie received feedback from colleagues of a need for more cross-WP exchanges to understand what is happening in the other WPs without necessarily needing to attend their own meetings. Daniel reminded the upcoming technical workshop was focused on the portal test experience, so more WP4-centric. Brian mentioned the annual meeting’s internal sessions (10th and 11th) seemed appropriate. Sophie confirmed the aim of these sessions was that everyone could see what everyone else is doing and possibly draw together an overall roadmap. But this certainly needs some preparation from each WP and maybe cross-WP beforehand so the agenda of these days will need to be refined with more precise proposals for WP leaders.

Brian mentioned the International FAIR convergence symposium 2020 organised by CODATA and GOFAIR at the end of November. WP2 will try and present a paper for a session (deadline 30th of September).

Sophie reported the EOSC symposium of mid-Oct would not be open for external talks, only the EOSC EB working groups will be presenting.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Andrei, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Majid, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Patrick submitted our ExPaNDS response to the SRIA yesterday. ALBA and PSI also responded as facilities. Patrick mentioned that for Germany, our main points were taken for the Helmholtz and the NGI DE responses.

The request for the extension is following its process, after the review by the PEB it was sent to the ExPaNDS CB, who is to approve it by the end of the week (in a meeting or via online vote). The shift in deliverables and milestones was shared after last PEB with PaNOSC and the 5B projects to detect possible negative impacts.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie reported the decision of the organising team to have a 100% online annual meeting instead of pushing to keep it partially F2F in Prague. The program was adapted a bit: the WP day which was originally on Tuesday is left for each WP leader to organise whenever they think is best. The WPs will need to be prepared to report during the two sessions on progress and roadmap originally planned for Wednesday. The Indico page with the draft agenda is here. Final modifications are being made but the invitation to register will be disseminated soon (probably this week).

WP1 gave feedback to the KPIs issued by EOSC landscape activities which can be found in the Sharepoint.

For a transparent reporting for future EU reviewers, during the summer Sophie prepared a webpage containing our PEB meeting minutes and progress reports, as well as the deliverables and milestones status. The page is here and the source code is in our GitHub (WP1-reporting repository). It is work-in-progress and an attempt for public reporting since SharePoint needs credentials. Any sort of feedback is very welcome.

WP2

Andrei confirmed the D2.1 data policy deliverable was in internal review for a foreseen delivery next week. Abigail presented the approach for this data policy framework to the 5b task force on FAIR last week which received a lot of interest. Andrei consequently asked how public the document was before EC review and which channels we had to share and publish it.
Patrick confirmed we didn’t need to wait for the EC review to make the deliverable public, their approval happening at mid-term at the earliest. Sophie added that after uploading the final deliverable to the EU portal she would also upload it to Zenodo, making it public.

WP2 is also working on harmonising the PaNdata ODI, Andrei reporting they detected a lack of terms and metadata elements they are planning to fill.

Regarding the work on the glossary, Andrei reported difficulties in reaching consensus, which could be solved if more experts from the PaN community were involved. Instead of using the EOSC channels to call for participation to the work meetings on the glossary as was first brought up, Patrick suggested to find the experts we needed and contact them directly.

For dissemination channels, once the deliverables are published, WP2 can refer to Isabelle and Kat to find the best means of publishing / sharing them. Zenodo, EOSCsecretariat and Twitter were given as examples.

Kat also mentioned the registration to the online workshop on FAIR would open by the end of this week.

WP3

Alun reminded the upcoming meetings on experimental techniques for T3.2. He also explained the outline of the D3.1 deliverable:

• status of facilities based on this survey results and including some updates,
• comparison with other domains,
• roadmap with all stages for the technical implementation of the federated catalogues,
• gap analysis per site with a template to be filled by each facility.

Alun is planning to distribute the latter template by the end of the week to be able to stick to an internal review of the deliverable starting end of Sept.

WP4

Anton is working on having a server up and running at DESY to emulate the PaNOSC portal and link the datasets. The plan is to have “something” for the October technical workshop. This test instance would then be available for all partners to access and progress on the testing framework.

Daniel reminded the presentation for the technical workshop also aims at sharing what did not work, so DESY’s input will be valuable anyway. Regarding the workshop, he reported 47 people registered already which was really good. HZB, HZDR, ISIS and ESRF also submitted answers to the survey and SOLEIL, ALBA and EUXFEL are planning to do so in the additional two weeks that were granted.
Only the confirmed number of presentations is too low, with PSI, HZDR, ELI and ALBA presenting so far. Daniel emphasised that he hoped every facility would present, even if they didn’t yet progress much (or at all) on the ‘portal experience’. A reminder will be sent in that sense, giving the 11th of Sept as a deadline to be able to build the agenda of the workshop accordingly.

WP5

Thibaud finished his D5.1 annual report on time for it to be submitted to the EU portal yesterday.

Uwe and him discussed about which WP leader they wished to meet during the annual meeting’s ‘WP day’ which was almost all of them for 1 hour each. Given the format change to online, these meetings can be scheduled anytime before the annual meeting or on the 10th afternoon.

Uwe also reported that Oliver was testing platforms and that we would present his results to the WP.

WP6

Isabelle is in close liaison with communicators at PaN facilities for the dissemination of the WP2 upcoming training workshop on FAIR and the ‘portal architecture test experience.

Sponsorship opportunities still reveal to be too expensive for the few networking possibilities they offer online. The user meeting with lightsources.org also presents some challenges, WP6 is rethinking how to best adapt.

Good news: Kat will represent ExPaNDS in a poster session at the SOLARIS user meeting next week, with the infographics on the benefits of open data.

AOB

Andrei is planning the presentation of his tests with IPFS around the 24th of September. He will send a doodle for a 1h-presentation including questions.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Majid, Thibaud, Uwe, Kat, Andy

Introduction

ExPaNDS extension

Sophie presented the updated timeline of deliverables and milestones. All WP were asked to check and comment on possible interactions that were not identified yet. The updated timeline will be shared with PaNOSC and the 5b projects tomorrow, 19th of August.

Feedback on EOSC SRIA

The ExPaNDS response to the SRIA consultation was shared by Patrick. Comments are still welcome before the document is also shared with PaNOSC and the 5b projects, again by tomorrow.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie reported Rudolf’s message to PaNOSC which was to encourage our facilities to express interest for membership in the EOSC Association. FYI the member fees will be used to cover the functioning costs of the Association which are estimated to eventually reach between 1.5 to 2 M€ / year. However, these fees could be, for the first year or maybe two, covered by the EOSCsecretariat co-creation fund. Asking to join will show our eagerness to get researchers well represented in the EOSC.

Sophie then updated on the annual meeting preparations and explained the purpose of the survey which was sent around to get an idea of how much effort we can / should put into keeping at least a part of the event as F2F. She also mentioned the answers expected from WP leaders to Florian’s e-mail about cross-WP meetings wishes. Alun said it had been discussed during WP3’s last joint meeting and that no specific need for WP3 was expressed, the 2 WPs being already fully synchronised with remote meetings.

WP2

Brian reported that the D2.1 deliverable should be ready for project review by the end of the week. The suggested reviewers were Frank Schlünzen, Uwe, Patrick and Sophie. It was agreed that the google doc version would be shared for comments, even though all references form the native version are not available, for formatting issues. Andy will also be involved in the review and Brian will be in touch separately to discuss with him and explain the differences to the PaNOSC data policy model.
It was agreed that the references should be added at the end of the document, in the final version, since there are ~100 of them and it would ultimately facilitate the work of the EU reviewers.

Brian and Abigail also reported the progress on the FAIR workshop of the 1st and 2nd of October with almost all speakers booked. The registration shall open ASAP and a parallel meeting with Kat will be planned this week to that end.

WP3

Alun was invited to a ‘Metadata catalogues integration workshop’ by FAIRsFAIR and inquired WP2 about it. It will hold on the 11h of September.

The ontology work continues with two meetings planned by Sylvia in September with PaNOSC.

Alun is also working on the D3.1 deliverable which should be available for project review at the end of September.

WP4

During the last WP4 meeting, Uwe mentioned the survey sent around by Daniel and confirmed he had responded for HZDR. The others were not all aware of it and Uwe recommended to send a reminder. He also raised the topic of AAI and the fact that all facilities didn’t necessarily use UmbrellaID, which was perceived by some as ‘experimental’. AAI is an important part of PaNOSC WP6 and Andy reminded that GEANT had made UmbrellaID sustainable and EOSC compliant, with EduTeams. Patrick mentioned it was good that facilities did the necessary steps to integrate the new version of UmbrellaID (which will soon be operational) but that it was more a ‘facility task’ than an ‘ExPaNDS task’.

The next steps for the reference datasets and their publication are to be clarified.

WP5

Thibaud reported that the D5.1 deliverable would be ready for project review by the beginning of next week.

Regarding the sustainability of the online learning platform, Thibaud suggested to ask LEAPS-IT if a takeover by LEAPS (and then LENS) was worth considering. Andy and others reminded that LEAPS had no staff or funding of their own so that it might not be possible. Uwe then suggested HZDR could take over for the platform after the project ends.

WP6

Kat reported the ongoing activities for the annual meeting and technical workshop preparation. The different calls for posters or talks did not materialise yet.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Thibaud, Kat

Introduction

Shift of M12 deliverables and milestones

As a result of last PEB and the discussions on the deliverables due M12 (Aug. 2020), the following shifts were submitted and accepted by our PO:

Deliverables	Due	Moved to	Linked to
D2.2	12	15	M10
D3.1	12	14
D6.4	12	16	M20, M5
D6.15	12	14

Milestones	Due	Moved to	Linked to
M5	12	15
M10	12	15	D2.2
M20	12	16	D6.4
M21	12	14
M22	12	20

For more details, see in appendix the rest of the message from Patrick to our PO.

Overall strategy for the extension

Patrick and Sophie are preparing the document to justify the extension. It contains the rescheduling of milestones and deliverables and the other mitigation actions like the shift from F2F to online events. The help of WP5 and WP6 will be needed to review this section in particular. As mentioned last time, this document will be submitted to the PO beginning of September at the latest.

For the rescheduling part, a recap of all individual plans was made during the meeting for WP2, 3, 5 and 6. WP2, WP4 and WP6 will send the updated plan to Patrick and Sophie who will compile them for the whole project and work on the overall consistency. The interfaces with other projects will also need to be detailed.

Feedback on EOSC SRIA

Patrick presented the request by the EOSC EB to provide feedback on the SRIA. There are different levels to provide this feedback and the first one is the facility. Patrick thus encouraged all partners to steer their facility to reply. On the ExPaNDS level, he asked all WP leaders to make themselves familiar with the document and questionnaire and state what they find is missing or wrong for our community. As a basis, Patrick suggested the following main points:

1. Communities are not represented enough in the strategy. We would benefit from a forum where we can express our concerns on what the EOSC is building for us.

2. There are plenty of interesting initiatives other projects are doing and it is up to us to find out about them. We would suggest a central expert in EOSC who could link relevant initiatives to projects which would benefit from them. E.g. the ESCAPE data lake which could be a game changer for PaNOSC WP6.

3. To make FAIR data sustainable for the future, we suggest the EOSC could take responsibility of the governance of the data after the owner facility has finished using it.

The contribution from each WP leader is expected for next Tuesday and the common response will be presented during next PEB. We will also share it with PaNOSC and the other 5b projects to make sure our views are concurrent.

Technical workshop

Kat reminded the PEB of the technical workshop to be held on the 8th of October. After a first notice to the TCB by Daniel, a mail was sent to all@expands.eu to encourage a more general public to register.

Status quo per WP

AOB

The terms ‘webinar’ and ‘e-learning’ are protected in Germany so we’ll need to avoid using them for our public dissemination and events...

Appendix

D2.1 Draft extended data policy framework for Photon and Neutron RIs

New Date: (12) In Time

D2.2 Draft recommendations for FAIR Photon and Neutron Data Management

New Date: (15) Nov 2020

Explanation: The deliverable was scheduled for the same month as D2.1, assuming there would be two different working groups in WP2. However, due to limited resources, those working groups are essentially the same people. So they have to finish D2.1 first and then can work on D2.2

Linked to Milestone: none

D3.1 Report on status, gap analysis and roadmap towards ...

New Date: (14) Oct 2020

Explanation: This definitely suffers from late hirings of some of the partners, primarily involved in WP3.

Linked to Milestone: none

D6.4 Vision and roadmap documents for key audiences

New Date: (16) Dec. 2020,

Explanation: 'Roadmap and Vision' depends on the technical work packages, which are late, (see D3.1) and on the 'All Hands Meeting'. The 'All Hands Meeting' (see M5) was moved to Nov, as a result of the goal to have this meeting collocated with PaNOSC. (Nov at ELI). The move of the 'All Hands Meeting' is not COVID related.

Linked to Milestone: M5

D6.15 Dedicated European user meeting focused on ExPaNDS

New Date: (14) Oct 2020

Explanation: Almost all of our facilities have banned users from their premises and only a very limited number of local beam-line scientists were allowed to run experiments, if at all. This is only slowly ramping up again. Therefore there was only little opportunity to get in touch with users. However, as the situation is not really improving we are working on a mitigation plan to move on.

We have a user meeting idea that we are currently working in collaboration with Lightsources.org for the autumn (October 2020). We have gained the support from the LS.org Canadian chair and it is in the early planning stages, with a view to promoting it once it has been set. In addition, we are in talks with WP2 for the FAIRs webinars scheduled for October plus we have scheduled the Technical (online) Workshop organised by our technical Director, also in October.

So, fingers crossed, we hope to have an equivalent of the planned European Users Meeting by end of October.

MS5: First All Hands meeting Organised

New Date: (14 - 15) First half of Nov (already fully planned)

Explanation: We moved this milestone to beginning of November to collocate it with the PaNOSC annual meeting in Prague at the ELI facilities. This give us a larger crowd and we can share resources. Finally this shift allowed us to collocate with a Symposium on PaN EOSC, shared organised by PaNOSC and us, with invited guests like You, Rupert, Tiziana and others.

MS 10: (D 2.2) 'Production of draft FAIR data framework'

New Date: (15) Nov 2020

Explanation: This is the result of moving D2.2 to Nov.

Linked to : D2.2

MS 20: 'Vision and Roadmap Documents'

New Date: (16) Dec. 2020,

Linked to: D6.4

Explanation: See D6.4

MS 21: 'Reference from community web site'

New Date : (13) Sep, 2020

MS 22: 'ESOF and AAAS Attendance'

New Date: (24) Aug, 2021

Explanation: Regarding ESOF and AAAS, we feel that the opportunities online are no longer meeting our grant's objectives of networking with funding agencies etc. So alternatives will be looked at.

For those two conferences, the only options were to agree on some sponsoring, which I personally was not happy with. The goal of the deliverable was to meet people/stakeholders of different areas and not to support them financially.

A cheap alternative would have been to provide online posters, however that won't give us much visibility. So the idea is to shift this deliverable by a year, hoping that either we'll have similar conferences taking place in real or that we and the various conference organisers find new ways of networking online.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Mirjam, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Majid, Nazaré, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

ExPaNDS extension

Following the Collaboration Board meeting, Patrick explained the decision of our partners to ask for an extension of ExPaNDS. Isabelle raised the challenge it represented for WP6 since Diamond was on track with its budget early-on in the project. She is however working on a solution that could be quite satisfactory, strengthening the synergies between ExPaNDS and lightsources.org. No other concern was raised by the WPs.

Patrick stressed that in the updated layout of our deliverables and milestones we should be very careful not to impact other projects. For example, Abigail mentioned that FAIRsFAIR is counting on our workshop at the beginning of October for a deliverable due in November. Our sister project PaNOSC wrote their proposal without ExPaNDS existing yet, but since then our common work can have created dependencies which have to be identified and addressed.

The best way to proceed was discussed and the following was agreed:

• before the end of the week, discuss with Patrick and Sophie if an issue is foreseen on one of the deliverables due in M12. N.B: except for WP2 and D2.2, which was discussed beforehand.
• in a week’s time, that is by next Tuesday, each WP leader (or co-lead for WP4) is to send an e-mail to Patrick and Sophie identifying all the dependencies between their WP, the other WPs and external projects.

The overall updated layout will then build on these inputs. Patrick reminded that it had to be ready for early September at the latest and that it was a ‘one-shot’ plan. A few guidelines were discussed and also agreed upon:

• the last month will be blocked for the final review preparation, no deliverable or milestone shall be planned then,
• we should delay deliverables and milestones as little as possible and in any case avoid delaying by more than 3-4 months (except of course when it’s intrinsically an end-of-project report).

Status quo per WP

WP1

Following Diego’s presentation on onboarding to EOSC, Sophie raised the need for our future services to have a helpdesk, an access policy and a privacy policy. Daniel mentioned we should look into it through sustainability for after the project’s end. Alun and Majid reminded most of our outcomes will depend on existing services, which should include those features.

WP2

Regarding D2.1, Brian mentioned WP2 carried on collecting the national policies landscape and had talked with Jos van Wezel from the policies task force of the 5B projects to see how we could help each other. There is still some work but the deliverable is shaping up, WP2 is still planning to have it ready for the end of August.

Regarding D2.2, as mentioned earlier it needs to be shifted by 3 months. Daniel, Abigail and Brian have reshaped it, reconciling their views on what it should be and the level of details needed.

The workshop on FAIR is planned for the 1st-2nd of October at 11am CEST. It will last 2x90min. The outlines of the content and the speakers are now decided, though some of the latter still need to confirm. Meetings are planned in the following weeks with WP5 and 6 to progress on the form. Abigail clarified that some parts of the workshop will be interactive but that, in the end, nothing would be asked from participants in advance. Actual exemples from HZDR, Diamond and ESRF will be included.

WP3

Alun mentioned that D3.1 is depending on input from all facilities which was not so easy in this period. It is progressing still.

WP4

During last WP4 meeting, Majid mentioned the discussions were focused on the testing platform. Daniel and Sophie reminded about the technical coordination workshop and the registration.

WP5

Nazaré mentioned that during the training task force of the 5B projects, we discovered the Elixir open source platform which was really interesting. It was shared with PaNOSC and it is now considered as an extension of the current PaNOSC e-learning platform. Its functionalities would be sufficient for ExPaNDS to put our content into and WP5 is considering talking to EGI to see if they could technically look into it. This would also mitigate the delays for the PaNOSC platform.

Nazaré and Thibaud said the next PaNOSC/ExPaNDS task force on training will need to agree on the way to proceed, and that it will probably be held in September. All agreed the ExPaNDS logo should be added to the PaNOSC platform as it should be seen as the PaN platform. Isabelle mentioned Diamond bought the e-photon.org domain and are planning to use it with lightsources as a mirror of e-neutron.org. Mirjam reminded the important role of PaNOSC and ExPaNDS in bringing together the Photon and Neutron communities.

WP6

Isabelle confirmed the 3rd ExPaNDS video on PaN facilities had been disseminated this week in e.g Twitter. WP6 is now still seeking, as alternatives to sponsorship, the best online conferences to come. Isabelle mentioned a Lightsources event in September where ExPaNDS could be presented, which would represent a good user meeting opportunity for the associated deliverable in WP6.

Regarding other deliverables, the corporate presentation was updated and is available in SharePoint. The roadmap and vision needs inputs from WP2-3-4 and Isabelle and Kat will evaluate the situation for M12 considering the adaptation needed for the extension.

Kat also mentioned the current website update in progress, which will link ExPaNDS to LEAPS and PaNOSC, among others.

AOB

Alun was positive about the candidates PSI received for ExPaNDS recruitment. The first round is now finished. As mentioned during the CB and reminded by Majid, Paris-region-compatible candidates will be ‘forwarded’ to Soleil.

Mirjam mentioned the recent publication of the ARIE position paper which will be presented in September during the Research and Innovation days (22-24th). The ARIE represents 120 facilities in Photon and Neutron science but also electrons, lasers, ions, protons… and has a very good connection with the European Commission, with whole parts of its publications often reused by the EC.

Following a question by Patrick, Mirjam also mentioned the ESFRI EOSC workshop in October, 6th-7th in Greece (near Athens). As our ExPaNDS annual meeting, they will decide by the end of August if it can remain on-site. The input from thematic projects like ExPaNDS and PaNOSC are very valuable to the EOSC and the agenda of this event is thus shaping around this. Next telco of the organisational committee will be in August.

Daniel mentioned Andy’s wish to reschedule the technical coordination workshop and his willingness to find another date but thought earlier would be too challenging. A new date was discussed and we decided for the 8th of October, with the 9th as an extension option if ‘too many’ facilities can attend.

Finally, Abigail asked whether WP leaders needed to alert tasks contributors on possible over- or under-spending. Patrick suggested the leaders should trust the partners to distribute their effort in the different WPs as they thought best. Only when a lack of involvement is detected should the PC and WP1 be alerted and offer support, as e.g. Patrick did for WP2 in the CB.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Interim report

The financial interim report is showing an important delay in spendings from almost all partners. The different reasons and solutions for this were discussed:

• Some partners don’t book all the PMs that people actually spent on the project, which can be due to a lack of experience with EU projects and can be fixed.
• Concerning recruitment processes:
• Good candidates for ExPaNDS need data management knowledge, PaN knowledge and SW development skills, which is scarce. Some leads to solve this were mentioned like focusing on one requirement per application and selecting the most eager to learn.
• The UK in particular is observing a scarcity of candidates, likely due to Brexit.
• COVID has impacted administrative teams, some partners reporting that recruitment was frozen for a period or at least put on low-priority for them to be able to focus on regulating home office.
• COVID has also reduced the number of applicants for some partners. It is now getting better, with even a lot more applicants e.g. for PSI: scientists who want to shift to data and data experts wanting to be more involved in science, both partly due to current events.
• Concerning the involvement of existing staff:
• COVID made it difficult for some partners to properly integrate new recruits and get them to understand the specificities of PaN instruments from home.
• COVID also impacted the involvement of the staff working in home office while having to care for their children, which after a few months can be really significant.
• Meeting F2F gives drive and enthusiasm to people, and again after a few months, the lack of it starts to show.
• Finally and most importantly, for several partners the IT staff in charge of ExPaNDS-like developments is also in charge of switching their facility’s business model to remote access in general, and in particular remote access to users for beamlines. Their dedication to ExPaNDS was reduced to focus more on these additional urgent new services.

On the technical level and on a more positive note, we start to see the benefits of the current paradigm shift, which is accelerating the uptake of remote analysis, cloud computing and open data. Several partners opened datasets to accelerate COVID research which paves the way to what we are working to achieve with ExPaNDS. More engagement from the users with remote analysis is also perceived. To make these opportunities more concrete, all WPs are to focus on actual examples and how to highlight them and use them for ExPaNDS.

Overall the PEB is confident we will reach our engagements by the end of the project, with small readjustments of the work to be achieved that we will keep monitoring as the COVID situation keeps evolving.

For the upcoming Collaboration Board meeting, Daniel will be presenting the progress highlights for WP2, 3 and 4 and Isabelle the ones for WP5 and WP6. A first version of the presentations will be shared with Patrick by Friday. The message to the CB regarding underspending will be that it can be fixed, with a plan and objectives for mid-term review.

Other transverse topics

Daniel exposed his suggestion for a technical coordination workshop with PaNOSC in September, which he has been discussing with Jamie. The main objective is to make every technical contributor to both projects know each other and discuss on common works, in particular the PaN portal deployment. A small section on COVID is also planned to share risks and opportunities (like we did today) and finally an extra feature would be to have a measure of the capacity of each facility in terms of data production, HPC, etc, as PaNOSC does.

The idea to add an ‘open space format’ to the agenda was suggested. Isabelle and Kat assured Daniel of their support for the organisation of this event.

All other also support the workshop and the 22nd of September was chosen for its date. Two expected outcomes were mentioned so far: a list of technical people and a technical topic for the next workshop. Daniel is building the Indico page and plans to send it around asap.

Regarding Andrey’s suggestion to use IPFS as a data transfer solution for ExPaNDS, the technology is very interesting and at the same time seems out-of-scope for now, the project focusing first on delivering what is in the DoW. It would be an interesting topic for a possible webinar though, if Andrey agrees to present his findings. Sophie will talk to him.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie reminded everyone of the upcoming onboarding presentation by Diego next week (15/07/2020).

WP2

A specific WP2 meeting is planned tomorrow where the request to delay one of the deliverables will be discussed in more details.

WP3

Cecilia Blasetti from Elettra presented wayforlight to WP3 last week (01/07/2020). The survey results were analysed by Sylvie who will present them to WP3 tomorrow (08/07/2020). The raw data will be uploaded to ExPaNDS public GitHub repository if no one objects then.

WP6

Our participation to AAAS’s upcoming event next year is in progress. The third ExPaNDS video on instruments is being circulated to the Heads of Comms at partner facilities and will be released afterwards.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Majid, Thibaud, Kat, Andy

Introduction

After a few months of COVID, Patrick exposed his plan to present an overall strategy to our PO for the deliverables that are to be adapted. As monitored since the start of the epidemic, a priori no significant delay is to be reported, only adaptation of our WP5 and WP6 workshops and events. The strategy will be shared with WP leaders in the coming days.

The proposal led by Technopolis for the EOSCINFRA-03 call was submitted last week. Rudolf in PaNOSC really helped us get ‘a seat at the table’ through DESY and PSI for ExPaNDS. The project, if accepted by the EC, will be called EOSC-Future and will start in Jan. 2021.

Concerning the EGI conference, Sophie didn’t submit our PaN session application yet. The deadline was reported to July, 15th. The remaining details will be addressed with Patrick and Andy and the application sent ASAP.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Diego from EGI is preparing a presentation for us to explain what onboarding to EOSC concretely means for ExPaNDS’ products. The meeting is sought to be held during the first half of July. It will primarily concern WP3 and 4 but can also be a good input for WP5 and what the 2nd workshop on EOSC should focus on.

Sophie received the first financial reports from our partners for the interim report. Meetings with each WP leader are planned at the beginning of July to be able to match this financial report with the technical progress.

The WP2 KPIs are now agreed. Valentina will upload the last version of the KPIs table to SharePoint for the others (WP3, WP5 and WP6) to check them and add narrative before the end of the month as previously agreed.

WP2

Concerning the data policy update (T2.1), discussions are still ongoing inside WP2 to revise the outline for the M12 deliverable. Abigail explained that for us national RIs, the national data policies could highly affect our own data policies and that a gap analysis needs to be made to measure the impact adopting the PaNOSC policy would have. Each partner is looking at those for the next meeting.

In parallel, the T2.3 on standards for data management is progressing normally, with a good implication of T3.2 contributors also.

During the preparation of the training workshop on FAIR, it appeared we lacked concrete examples of FAIR success stories for PaN users. If someone has suggestions, please send them to Abigail.

WP2 was also approached by FREYA for a 15-min-presentation on PIDs for a workshop planned in July. We are studying the possibility to deliver.

WP3

The user stories as raw results of the survey have been uploaded to the SharePoint by Silvia. An internal WP3 presentation of the analysis of the results is being organised. A presentation to a wider audience will be planned afterwards.

Works on the ontology are progressing, with the Pankos ontology being integrated into ExPaNDS’. The use of BioPortal to publish our ontology is currently being investigated, with the possibility to onboard the overall service into EOSC.

The Wayforlight presentation will be rescheduled for next week. Off-meeting: it is rescheduled for the 1st of July @10am CEST.

WP4

The selection of the reference data sets is finalised. Anton reported the focus was now going to the implementation of the test framework, lead by MAX IV.

WP5

Since online workshops need less organisation, Thibaud suggested to make more workshops, but shorter and on more specific subjects. The format was agreed: a 1 day F2F workshop is ~equivalent to 4 x 90 minutes online sessions, which can be split over several days. However, the effort for the other WPs to come up with the content is the same online or not so for now the planned workshops remain the same.

After the first FAIR workshop in Sept. ‘20, we will adapt if necessary.

Thibaud is also preparing a template for all WP leaders to fill with possible content we want to upload to the e-learning platform. The content should be both ‘IT-’ and ‘science-’ oriented.

An internal meeting on resources is planned at Soleil tomorrow to review the overall situation for ExPaNDS, including potential PM transfer propositions to other partners. Thibaud will keep Patrick and WP1 updated on the outcome.

WP6

The work on the 3rd video of the series, on PaN instruments, is ongoing and Kat expects it to be ready by the end of the month, although it is not a deliverable per se.

The revised version of the ExPaNDS general presentation will also be submitted for review by Patrick, Daniel and Sophie by the end of the week.

Kat also reported on the 3 major events WP6 was investigating for us. She is in contact with these 3 conferences to discuss sponsorship possibilities:

• the Joint 28th AIRAPT and 59th EHPRG International Conference on High pressure science and technology in Edimburg in July ‘21
• an AAAS online conference in Feb. ‘21, for which Kat participated in a preparatory webinar and to which we can also submit posters (opening application date for e-posters: 4th August ‘20)
• the ESOF conference in Sept. ‘20, which is very expensive (too expensive), but can still shift online, and probably will.

Internally at Diamond, there will also be on the 30th of July an internal webinar on Jupyterhub and Kubernetes. It will be recorded and will act as a try-out for the ExPaNDS user webinar.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Mirjam, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Kat, Andy

Introduction

For ontology works and for more collaborative developments to come, it was decided an ExPaNDS repository should be set up in GitHub.com. WP6 will create it and co-administrate it with WP1.

About the EGI conference which is calling for abstracts, a text was drafted and sent to the PEB by Sophie on the 3rd of June. The swift participation of each WP leader to improve it is expected by tomorrow so we can work on it and submit it in time on June, 19th.

The question of the relevance to have separate neutron and photon e-learning platforms for dissemination purposes and consistency with lightsources.org and neutronsources.org was raised. The general opinion of the PEB was that it would be a shame to create a schism in the community when there is no real scientific ground (~25% of the community overlapses). The idea to have tags or filters to be able to focus on photon or neutron was suggested. We should be able to add this feature to the platform.

Patrick updated us on the INFRA-EOSC 03 call, due on 18th of June. DESY and PSI will be proposed as partners by Rudolf for WP5 with the crystallography use-case mentioned last time. Patrick is discussing with EUDAT and RDA to get the PaN community also in WP10 (community engagement). Concerning INFRA-EOSC 07 call, which is specific services offered through EGI, among ExPaNDS partners it seems only DESY and STFC are involved.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie mentioned the interim report had started with a good response from our partners’ project offices.

For our annual meeting with PaNOSC, the Indico page will soon be open for registration, with the preliminary programme. Brian asked Susan Daenke from EOSC-Life if she would be interested to be our speaker for FAIR, her answer is pending.

The WP leaders are working on the KPIs Valentina sent around, WP2 in particular is struggling to find better KPIs. The deadline was set to the end of June.

WP2

Abigail and Brian expressed worries on the ongoing works in WP2. The consultation process with facilities is more complicated than foreseen, because they don’t want to be bound to any suggestion made to the policy framework in a short delay, without having followed the usual thorough and high-level internal process of data policy discussions. The focus of the M12 deliverable will need to be adapted and the strategy for facility consultation redesigned.

The other tasks are also struggling to go ahead, due to a lack of momentum which is not likely to get better with the summer and the loosening of the travel restrictions. A dedicated PC/WP2 meeting will be planned to discuss this matter offline.

WP3

The survey from T3.2 is now closed, it had 52 responses. The results will be anonymised and analysed for an internal WP3 presentation. The preliminary results are really interesting. In parallel, Silvia is investigating with other projects to see how they make their ontologies available. Alun mentioned he would be starting the M12 deliverable.

WP6

Kat reported on the current work on organising the webinar on Kubernetes and the replacement of one of the deliverables with a third video to finish the current series. This one will explain how light and neutron sources work.

The ExPaNDS general presentation template will also be updated by the end of the month to integrate the architecture.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Majid, Thibaud, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

About the INFRA-EOSC 03 call, so far the foreseen partners to represent the PaN community are: ESRF, ILL, DESY and PSI TBC. It is not yet clear what will concretely be in the proposal for us but what is important is that the PaN community gets a seat at the table. Patrick suggested DESY would represented the other ExPaNDS partners as ESRF is representing other PaNOSC partners. For this, a PaN use-case is being elaborated in crystallography. Patrick will update the PEB with further information as soon as possible. It was agreed that after that, the CB should be informed.

N.B: LEAPS and LEANS would have been good candidates to represent the community but they are not yet legal entities.

Our PO asked for our participation to the assessment of the EOSC compared to the milestones set in its 2018 roadmap. A shared document1 was set up and lots of input were already given. Patrick and Sophie asked Alun and Anton to contribute so they can finish up and provide ExPaNDS’ feedback on time for Thursday, 28th.

About the EGI conference1 which is calling for abstracts, we agreed to apply for a PaN session with PaNOSC. The conference will take place in November 2020, before the ExPaNDS/PaNOSC annual meeting, in Amsterdam. The possibility to showcase synergies with EOSC-Life and ESCAPE were suggested. The actual focus of the session will be discussed, the deadline for the call is June, 19th.

Majid explained the difficulties of Soleil to recruit were not resolved, with no suitable candidate since the new announcement. It was agreed that Majid should send the details to Patrick and Sophie so that a plan B could be found.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Sophie reminded of the upcoming interim report, to get a first financial status of all partners. A table with the PMs and overall costs will be asked from all financial contacts next week. The technical twin report will consist of the updated progress reports.

The updated KPIs Valentina sent around need to be validated by the WP leaders. They will be included in the next reports. Concerning the risks update, WP2 mentioned they saw no additional risk to what Valentina sent. Valentina suggested a dedicated brainstorming to try and be more specific in the analysis.

Following EOSC-hub week, Sophie mentioned interesting achievements from other projects and suggested to name a technical EOSC interface in WP3 and in WP4. The summary posted internally at DESY will be shared to show the sort of achievements.

WP2

The PaNOSC data policy is now finished and Abigail explained WP2 has distributed roles for ExPaNDS facilities consultation on the policy to be held until mid-June. The glossary is also progressing.

WP3

WP3 has contributed to PaNOSC’s search API deliverable. Concerning the survey, Alun and Silvia mentioned 41 responses had been obtained, showing common trends. The deadline was extended one last time to the 5th of June to get more input, notably from MAX IV and ISIS (which is important to get a neutron source point of view).

WP4

The reference use cases are progressing with the shared document completed by each facility. Majid also reported that regular meeting are now in place, holding every two weeks.

WP5

For the training session on FAIR, Abigail explained that current discussions with FAIRsFAIR led to the following: FAIRsFAIR would provide general content and ExPaNDS would add specific PaN content like the data policy and the DMPs. The targeted audience is facility scientists and staff. The workshops will be recorded and made available if possible, the modalities are still being discussed though. Sophie suggested to look at what Ni4os had done regarding training with ‘BigBlueButton’.

WP6

Isabelle reported the last ExPaNDS video was successfully disseminated in the community, e.g. with lightsources and neutronsources.org.

The upcoming webinar on Kubernetes was discussed, especially if we should orientate it to the concrete issues of deploying the PaNOSC portal at our sites as Daniel and Jamie were planning to do in a transverse technical workshop. A specific meeting will be set up to progress on this (see actions). Isabelle wanted the first webinar to take place in June.

AOB

Daniel presented ExPaNDS to his facility scientists in a recorded video available on YouTube!

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Mirjam, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Silvia, Anton, Thibaud, Uwe, Kat

Introduction

Along with the other 5b projects, ExPaNDS is writing a position paper on EOSC. To have a common position for the PaN community, Andy gracefully agreed we can reuse PaNOSC’s paper. There are however a few added items and Sophie asked for a review by the PEB (including Andy) before the end of the week.

Status quo per WP

WP1

For the panel discussion on EOSC during the November annual meeting, Mirjam will see if she can organize herself to attend by the end of the week. In this case the CB would be moved to Monday also (which is still compatible with the programme).

For the second talk of the plenary session, Brian will talk to Susanna Sansone.

Sophie updated on the progress reports that are currently being written for each WP. WP3’s report is available in the SharePoint, WP2 and WP4 are being finalised. The reports for WP1, 5 and 6 will then follow (not started yet).

The EOSC-hub documents on the future EOSC helpdesk, accounting and monitoring was briefly introduced. It was agreed a feedback would be given to these documents before the 8th of May.

WP2

Abigail updated on the current works concerning the data policy being evaluated against the RDA data maturity model. The next step will be to start the consultations with our facilities. UKRI will ask for help from Soleil and PSI, the other 2 contributors to this task. Mirjam said the contact point for PSI was Valentina.
Off meeting: As long as the open position for SOLEIL is not filled, Majid and Brigitte remain the contact points for SOLEIL for WP2.

Concerning the glossary, the gathering of terms and definitions is coming to an end. The next step will be to reach a consensus on one definition per term with every contributor. Abigail also mentioned she’s been discussing with the EOSC glossary and that their approach was a bit different and not directly applicable to ExPaNDS.

To fill in the KPI on the number of data DOIs issued by our partner facilities, Brian said the datacite repository could be used directly, searching by facility. Abigail added she was looking for an automatic way to retrieve the data.

WP3

The WP3 workshop that was supposed to be held in M6 was not officially done like this but the objectives behind it were attained (clarification of the distribution of work between WP2, WP6 and WP3 on ontologies, coordination of activities with WP4). Patrick asked for a written justification.

Concerning the survey on search terms, the answers are still too “photon and Diamond centered”, but the partners are distributing it to their scientists (in progress at Soleil, Alba and HZDR). Sophie and Kat will also advertise it on EOSC platforms.

It raised the importance of explaining beforehand to our facilities scientists what ExPaNDS is concretely going to offer. In “COVID work mode”, it has been a bit complicated but Kat reminded what support was available in the SharePoint and Daniel and Alun are planning online presentations. Uwe mentioned he already used the poster to present ExPaNDS at HZDR.

WP5

For the first workshop on FAIR, there was some discussions with FAIRsFAIR to see what content could be re-used. They also advised us on not trying to cover every FAIR topic in only one workshop.

A task force with Uwe and PaNOSC to plan the workshops is in place with regular meetings. Thibaut also explained we was collecting existing training content from the facilities that could be already uploaded to the platform. We asked for technical contacts for each facility. The members of the TCB seemed like the good target (see who’s who).

WP6

The ExPaNDS second video is now ready for a final review by the PEB before today EOB. It will then be delivered in the following days. Kat said there would also be a poster to accompany the video, like last time.

Following Andy’s suggestion, a “related projects” page will be added to the website, with PaNOSC and other relevant projects.

A communication of our partner’s achievements regarding COVID and the fact that ExPaNDS is carrying out with his works could be the subject of a tweet, using the EU template against COVID provided by our PO.

AOB

Should we try and participate to ICT 2020? Seems like ExPaNDS/PaNOSC should at least be represented. It’s in Cologne at the beginning of December.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Abigail, Alun, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Alun asked if an amendment was conceivable to ask to reallocate personnel costs (cat ‘A’) to sub-contracting (cat ‘B’). After a discussion on the financial possibilities it was agreed that before considering an amendment, PSI would see internally if they can make do with costs reallocations between ‘A’ and ‘D’ (other direct costs), and have their possible contractor only to support PSI staff in the tasks (and not take over).

Off-meeting: the indirect costs apply to ‘A’ and ‘D’ budget categories at the same flat-rate of 25% so no problem when reallocating from ‘A’ to ‘D’ or from ‘D’ to ‘A’.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Recruitment update: No further recruitment needed

Sophie mentioned the EOSC co-creation fund was open to COVID linked initiatives.

A folder to record the minutes is available in SharePoint, Sophie asked to put the minutes there to make them more sustainable than floating Google docs: Document Library / Meeting minutes

WP2

Recruitment update: 1 position for ALBA to be published soon (general delay at ALBA re. recruitment because of Corona) TBC for PSI but will probably only affect current resources (Sophie to ask Mirjam) TBC for Soleil (Sophie to ask Brigitte)

Abigail reported WP2 set a timeline for upcoming tasks and activities and was carrying on as planned with the data policy framework, glossary and building the data life cycle (building on PaNdata deliverables).

Kat reminded there was a previous version of an ExPaNDS glossary that could be used.

Alun asked how much WP2 was focused on FAIR data compared to FAIR services. Followed a discussion to stress that WP2 could and should help on all aspects of FAIR (not only ‘F’ and ‘A’) and not only regarding data but also to make WP3 and WP4 products FAIR themselves.

WP3

Recruitment update: 1.5 FTE to be filled by current job advertisements from PSI TBC for Diamond (Sophie to ask Silvia) 1 position to be filled by upcoming job advertisement from Soleil (update of a position open since January but that found no satisfactory candidate) Same as WP2 for ALBA

A meeting focused on management and reporting for WP3 is being organised this week by Alun, notably to feed the progress report. He also reported the search terms survey Diamond took with beamline scientists got 22 responses and was already being improved.

WP4

Recruitment update: 0.5 FTE to be filled by current job advertisement from PSI 1 position to start very soon with Anton at DESY 0.2 FTE to be filled by upcoming job advertisement at DESY to work specifically on portal deployment Same as WP3 for Soleil Same as WP2 for ALBA 0.5 FTE to be fully available from July 2020 on for HZDR (Oliver)

Deliverable due M18: Anton and Patrick are adjusting on a common view of what the D4.1 deliverable should be.

WP5

Recruitment update: 0.5 FTE to be fully available from July 2020 on for HZDR (Oliver)

The first workshop on FAIR which was planned for M12 will be virtual. WP5 and WP2 would rather have it in M13-14 to have time to focus on the deliverables due M12 and get some feedback on them before the actual workshop. This however will still be discussed.

The second workshop on recommendations for national RIs on common practices’ focus and content still needs to be defined. It was agreed though, that there was no need to wait for the EOSC-INFRA 03 and 07 calls to start.

The third workshop on data analysis (planned M25) could be held at PSI.

Patrick also asked WP5 to study the possibility to have online workshops and not only F2F, even after Corona. It indeed seems like a good way to reach a wider number of users, virtual sessions being more flexible. In this case, good ideas to reallocate the travel budget to PMs would be welcome.

Thibaud also mentioned there would be a webinar by PaNOSC to explain how to create content on the e-learning platform. It will be planned around Q3 2020 and will be of interest to all potential ‘content uploaders’ (see MAX IV and Lunds University, and other university partners for participation).

WP6

Recruitment update: No further recruitment needed

Deliverable due M8: Info sheet on ExPaNDS and benefits of open data for RI users (Diamond): will be the second video introducing ExPaNDS. The storyboard will be shared today with Patrick and Sophie.

The ExPaNDS first video infographics was released last week, in the lightsources.org newsletter, Twitter, the website…

The first round of webinar ideas is almost ready and was fed by internal discussions at Diamond. The use of container technologies for cloud computing (with Kubernetes) was suggested, for example.

AOB

Daniel reported that he was discussing with Jamie Hall (TC of PaNOSC) on a workshop dedicated to testing the PaNOSC portal to get details on each facility’s experience, needs and difficulties in the deployment process.

A discussion followed, for which an outline summary is attempted here. It is essential that the use cases we choose for ExPaNDS resonate within the user community and all WP are concerned by them. There is no use focusing on ‘fancy’ use cases (offering Jupyter Notebooks through containers) if it only reaches a small part on the community. On the other hand, it is important to create value with ExPaNDS, not only reproducing what we can already do (HPC friendly interface). This balance still needs to be found and finding the right use cases to express the community need before focusing on the actual solutions is becoming a priority.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Mirjam, Brian, Abigail, Alun, Thibaud, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

COVID consequences: an email was sent around to partners via cb@expands.eu to evaluate the potential impacts. Updates will follow.

Reporting: specific meetings with each WP leader, Patrick and Sophie have started and will carry on to help WP1 better track the technical progress against PM consumption.

For findability purposes, Brian will put PaN data ODI deliverables that are of useful input to us in Zenodo to get a DOI and link them to the ExPaNDS, PaNOSC and an umbrella community to be created.

Update on annual meeting:

• 1st day plenary with external speakers (Jan Hrusak, 1 for FAIR, 1 “visionary”)
• 2nd day WP meetings
• 3rd day wrap-up: action plan for next months

PaNOSC “EB” will meet and we’ll try and have a CB meeting also. The possibilities in the current schedule are Monday morning, Tuesday end of afternoon or Wednesday afternoon. Mirjam explained that for PSI to be best represented (because there is a clash with an important PSI quality review), having the CB on Wednesday (preferred) or Tuesday would make things easier. Sophie will see to that with ELI and contact the CB.

Brian informed that the RDA plenary (which is at the same time) is preparing for remote participation so we should also study the possibility for at least some people to participate remotely. Sophie will suggest this to the next annual meeting organisation meeting.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Draft rules of participation to the EOSC were made public by the RoP WG. Mirjam explained ExPaNDS was at a too early stage to be able to provide feedback. Patrick agreed.

KPIs: Mirjam will get in contact with the WPs to complete and refine the KPIs from the proposal and get closer to PaNOSC’s.

Sophie informed that our best contribution to the 5b projects task forces on policies, FAIR and onboarding, ExPaNDS being the only thematic project there, was still to be found. Brian offered to meet separately to discuss the FAIR TF. Kat and Thibaud are doing well with the TFs on dissemination and training.

WP2

Currently there is a lot of progress made consulting the WP2 contributors on the data policy framework with PaNOSC, which is much appreciated. The next steps will be to integrate the facilities, starting with a survey to compare their data policy status with the current draft framework. Abigail explained the methodology for the survey was being developed.

The need for a precise definition of the terms used emerged from the meetings so Brian started a project glossary.

The activity to produce recommendations for good data management also started.

WP3

Alun reported that the scientists survey on search terms was sent at the same time Diamond asked them to work from home. There are only few results and the deadline will be extended.

The work to clarify the general task on ontology is well advanced with regular meetings between WP2 and WP3. The minutes are available in the SharePoint (in Document Library/Meeting minutes).

WP4

A meeting to define the test data sets of areas of interest will hold this Friday to follow-up on last week’s meeting.

WP4 is also working on integration of the PaNOSC portal.

WP5

The e-learning ELI platform (pan-learning.org) is migrating well and should soon be available.

A meeting to organise the first workshop is scheduled for this Thursday (April, 2nd). Remote possibilities will be assessed.

Uwe and Brian confirmed that with the current progress on FAIR, the 1st workshop should be dedicated to WP2 content.

WP6

Deliverable due M8: Info sheet on ExPaNDS and benefits of open data for RI users (Diamond)

For WP6 one of the Covid-19 impact is the delayed dissemination of the poster/video. Isabelle also made a contextual change to the video (changing the virus spread page). Its publication in lightsources.org and neutronsources.org is scheduled for Friday.

By the end of April the second video will be published, on the benefit of open data, under Daniel’s technical overview.

About the webinar, a first round-up of topics will be sent to the PEB for brainstorming by Kat next week. The WP6/WP meetings will also start again as of next week.

AOB

EOSC Pillar webinar on landcaping results (open science national initiatives state-of-the-art for Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy): 03.04 @13:00 CEST

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Valentina, Brian, Abigail, Silvia, Anton, Thibaud, Nazaré, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Brian introduced Abigail McBirnie who is joining STFC and ExPaNDS as of this week, mainly to work on WP2.

Valentina and Patrick reported Mirjam's suggestions for ExPaNDS/PaNOSC annual meeting speaker: Amadeo Perazzo from Stanford SLAC and Ian Foster from Argonne. Other suggestions are still welcome, send them to Patrick and Sophie please.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Deliverable due M6: Sustainability policy report (PSI): is currently being reviewed and will be uploaded today or tomorrow. Daniel said we would send his comments today.

Sophie gave an overview of the upcoming deliverables until August 2020.

WP1 works will focus on coordination with EOSC related projects now that the first phase with many deliverables is finished. Sophie asked for communication needs that were not yet fulfilled and especially a way to share all the meeting minutes. It raised the problems encountered by several with SharePoint (see WP6).

WP2

The data policy framework due in 08.2020 is the next big step for WP2. The next 'tangible' deadline to track progress on this task is the survey to be sent to all partners on data policy in the coming 3 weeks.

WP3

The current main task is on ontology. A survey to understand the search terms of the beam lines scientists at DLS will be sent in the following days, to get real users' input. They will have two weeks to answer and then after the results are analysed, it will be expanded to other facilities. The aim is to prioritize the ontology in the fields of most interest to scientists. A meeting with WP2 is also planned next week to work on the ontology.

WP4

The current focus is still trying to identify the reference datasets and integrating the PaNOSC portal.

WP5

Thibaud faces obvious difficulties trying to organise workshops when nobody is travelling. Two workshops are supposed to be organised by the end of August, with one on FAIR. WP5 is thinking of a plan B, Patrick reminded that no delay should be asked to the PO unless we really have no solution. A date for a telco with WP leaders is currently set up (see e-mail to WP leaders) to progress on this.

WP6

Isabelle asked Daniel to help WP6 with the technical content of the ExPaNDS info sheet due end of 04.2020, he accepted. Isabelle also announced that the ExPaNDS video would be advertised using lightsources.org weekly newsletter and neutronsources.org.

Given the current circumstances with COVID-19 outbreak in Europe, the dedicated user meeting will most probably turn into a Webinar. Diamond has all the infrastructure to hold such events. A list of topics that could attract the widest audience will be suggested and discussed with WP leaders and TC in the following weeks.

There are still access problems from ALBA and PSI to the SharePoint. WP6 is working on a solution ASAP!

AOB

Rich ICAT F2F meeting at ESRF. Link to the minutes to be shared by Silvia.

🙋 Patrick, Sophie, Thibaud, Kat, Andy

Introduction

The request from the EOSC executive board to have access to ExPaNDS list of deliverables, due dates and parts of DoW was shared with EB. All present consented, the others will get a chance to give their point of view offline (see actions).

Update on annual meeting and the fact that the simultaneity with the RDA plenary would probably not be enough to change now to the October option. Final decision should follow soon (in the meantime, book the 9-10-11 of November).

Status quo per WP

WP1

Deliverables due M6:

• General Architecture in relation to the EOSC services (EGI): update on progress and challenges, we want to deliver it tonight. Patrick also mentioned we will try and get the PO to review it before the mid-term review since it is a structuring deliverable. A meeting will soon be called by PC with WP3/4/TC to build on the architecture and draw the road map for the next 6 months.
• Sustainability policy report (PSI): will be shared in the coming days (PSI did commit to it).
• POPD - Requirement No. 1 (DESY): delivered on time, consequences for consent forms discussed.

The deliverables process must be improved. WP1 will make efforts to know who is in charge of each upcoming deliverable sooner. WP leaders will be encourage to identify lead authors and make sure they are aware of it.

WP5

Thibaud commented on the workshop on training in EOSC he attended last week: he will share the outcome of it (general and high-level guidelines for training, rules of participation). He wishes to see the scientific users more represented to these events (lots of open science experts, no scientists). Patrick reminded our privileged channel to reach the EOSC for now was the INFRAEOSC-5B task forces.

WP6

Deliverable due M6: Engage science communicators based at PAN RIs + Infographic of metrics and KPI linked to WP2, 3 and 4 + ExPaNDS presentation for conferences (Diamond): All three delivered on time! Publicity on them to follow, with an event/meeting/something to relate to, to make it more striking.

The next deliverable is due M8 by Diamond: Standard Information sheet on ExPaNDS and the benefits of Open Data for RI users. A brainstorming will soon take place between Isabelle and Kat. PaNOSC and WP2 will be asked to contribute.

Kat shared the challenges for the Dedicated European user meeting focused on ExPaNDS due this summer. Anton will not present at IUCr and other leads must be found. With the foreseeable restriction on travel, this deliverable is more than uncertain for now!

AOB

ICAT F2F meeting @ESRF (link to indico) on 10-11.03.2020 (registration deadline 05.03.2020)

FAIRsFAIR synchronisation force workshop on 29.04.2020 (invitation only)

🙋 Daniel, Sophie, Brian, Alun, Thibaud, Kat, Andy

Introduction

PaNOSC and ExPaNDS joint annual meeting

The PaNOSC/ExPaNDS meeting will take place in Prague, on Nov. 9-10-11 noon to noon. Soleil confirmed the fact that they could attend during the French public holiday.

About the suggested format, as experienced by WP3 during the last weeks, a cross-WP meeting between WP3 and WP4 could be a good opportunity to progress on architecture. It will be suggested we add this to the agenda of the second day.

Deliverables

The Project Quality Assurance Plan (PSI) and the Data Management Plan (DESY) were both delivered to the EU. Zenodo as a repository for our public deliverables will now be used. ExPaNDS contributors will be encouraged to have an ORCID so they can be uniquely identified in Zenodo. It was also decided that the published deliverables be available on expands.eu. WP6 confirmed it was ongoing work.

General Architecture in relation to the EOSC services (EGI): this deliverable is progressing thanks to a joint effort of Diego and Daniel to shape the document. The architecture itself is currently being discussed mainly between the participants of the 07.02 F2F meeting for WP4. It was agreed now that the results of these discussions should be shared to a wider audience (WP2-3-4) to get their input.

Sustainability policy report (PSI): will be shared in the coming weeks.

Engage science communicators based at PAN RIs (Diamond): for personal data protection reasons and because it is a public deliverable, this cannot be published as a database of contacts. WP6 is reviewing the alternatives (e.g. using a JiscMail list).

Infographic of metrics and KPI linked to WP2, 3 and 4 (Diamond): WP6 confirmed this deliverable would be submitted for review by Thursday (20.02.2020) at the latest, including the associated video.

ExPaNDS presentation for conferences (Diamond): WP6 confirmed the ’not targeted’ presentation will be submitted for review by the beginning of next week (24-25.02.2020).

POPD - Requirement No. 1 (DESY): WP1 is currently reviewing this deliverable with DESY’s DPO and will submit it to the concerned partners (at least Diamond, Soleil, UKRI and DESY, to be confirmed by DPO) for review as soon as possible.

Status quo per WP

WP1

In addition to the work on the deliverables, WP1 suggests WP5 participate in the 5B projects task force on FAIR so they can be involved in the FAIRsFAIR synchronisation workshops.

WP2

A recruitment is under way at STFC to assist Brian on ExPaNDS WP2, and a new person should arrive in March. Brian, Andy and Daniel agreed on meeting to talk about the data policy and Brian will attend PaNOSC’s Data policy VC on the 19.02.2020 at 1pm CET.

FYI, the issue of Data Intelligence on FAIR principles is worth reading and some of their recommendations will be added to the working data policy framework.

WP3

The main achievements of the F2F meeting of WP3² in Lund are:

• General agreement on the common API v1
• Relationship to WP4 work clarified
• Discussions on architecture going quite well

The distribution of T3.2 (ExPaNDS ontology) between the partners must be clarified with WP2 and WP6. Alun is seeing to it. It was reminded a similar work on ontology was made for the PaN data project.

WP5

The F2F meeting with ESS is postponed since PaNOSC’s platform expert is unavailable for now. WP5 is participating in the 5B project task force on training (first meeting tomorrow, 19.02.2020). The call for participation to the EOSC WG on training will also be examined.

WP6

In addition to the work on the deliverables, WP6 is planning a talk for ExPaNDS during the micro symposia at IUCr (the plenary and key sessions are already booked) and seeing to it with Anton (WP4). Andy mentioned he would be giving a talk at the workshop on raw data management (link) and that it would be good if the PaN community was represented at the one on MX data formats, metadata and validation (link).

The participation at SXNS event in Lund end of June will not be pursued.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Alun, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat

Introduction

PaNOSC and ExPaNDS joint annual meeting

The PaNOSC/ExPaNDS meeting will take place in Prague, a priori​ during the 19.10 week. Since it follows the Jupyter Notebooks meeting organised by Hans (CFEL), it would be better not to have it start on Monday. A capacity of 100 people was foreseen by PaNOSC and initially agreed by WP1 but the PEB would be more confident with 120-150. A phone meeting is to be quickly booked with ELI+WP6+WP1+PaNOSC to progress on the subject (room capacities, task distribution...).

Deliverables

Project Quality Assurance Plan (PSI) to be delivered in the next few days. Kind reminder to update the responsible partners for each deliverable ​in the shared table​.

Project Data Management Plan (DESY) delayed to February to have the time to get everybody’s consent (incl. PaNOSC) on the main points (that is: we’ll get DOIs from Zenodo, populate PaN software catalogue, use CC licences for deliverables). Kind reminder to review ​the (short) document​.

General Architecture in relation to the EOSC services (EGI)​: important document that must quickly be discussed between Diego and the technical WPs. It was agreed that the subject would be added to the WP4 F2F meeting agenda on 07.02.2020 and that a telco with Diego, Anton and Alun should quickly follow. No delay for this deliverable will be accepted by the PO since it’s a structuring deliverable.

Sustainability policy report (PSI): PO informed of a slight possible delay

Engage science communicators based at PAN RIs (Diamond): in the form of a database

Infographic of metrics and KPI linked to WP2, 3 and 4 (Diamond): well advanced, ready for review in the following days

ExPaNDS presentation for conferences (Diamond): already available on SharePoint, although not targeted to a specific conference

POPD - Requirement No. 1 (DESY)

Status quo per WP

WP1

Shared table for ​ExPaNDS/PaNOSC collaboration​ and monthly WP1 meeting in place. Start of all INFRA-EOSC 5B task forces following the enforcement of the Collaboration Agreement.

WP2

Daniel is checking with Brian before officially stating we want a common PaNOSC/ExPaNDS data policy framework. If so, he will make sure we have a more active role in the creation of the data policy framework with PaNOSC and the ExPaNDS facilities are involved since it’s an important document. Review meeting on the living document every 2 weeks.

WP3

Reminder of the F2F joint meeting in Lund on 11-12 February.

WP4

Reminder of the WP4 F2F meeting in Hamburg.

WP5

The e-learning platform shall be renamed and made available by PaNOSC by the end of February. A F2F meeting is being organised to clarify how we can populate the platform. A wider call for participation will be made (​doodle still open​) since it can potentially be of interest to other WPs as well.

WP6

Reminder to present ExPaNDS in our respective facilities. The Diamond presentation by Mark had 50 attendees! Recent work is focused on getting slots for ExPaNDS in future user meetings and working on M6 deliverables.

🙋 Patrick, Daniel, Sophie, Brian, Alun, Anton, Majid, Kat, Iztok

Introduction

PaNOSC and ExPaNDS collaboration

The participation to PaNOSC WP regular meetings and vice-versa is in place or is improving. The WP leads will make sure someone is there to represent ExPaNDS for all future meetings.

The joint annual meeting with PaNOSC was agreed. The proposal from ELI to host it in Prague was discussed. The only problem for ExPaNDS is financial. Since there is no ExPaNDS partner in Czech Republic, it would mean a potentially important loss of VAT. We need to ask PaNOSC if it would still be possible to change the location. If that is the case, it was suggested that either the UK or Sweden could see if they could host (last year was in Italy and the KO meeting for ExPaNDS was in Germany).

Concerning the dates, there is no foreseen constraint in the 2 periods suggested by PaNOSC (19.10. - 1.11 or 9.11. - 13.11), only a wish to have it as close to the 19.10 as possible considering our anniversary is in September. The LEAPS plenary will hold at the end of Nov. and so will - probably - the EOSC symposium.

Finally concerning the format, it still needs to be discussed but the following was drawn-up:

• 1st day of joint plenary meeting,
• 2nd day of separate plenary meeting,
• 3rd and 4th day of technical exchanges among WP, joint and/or separate depending on the wishes of each WP leaders.

Feedback on Sharepoint

It was agreed to have a 2-weeks try-out of the SharePoint collaboration space in ‘real conditions’. Every file from the landing page will be copied and only SharePoint is to be used until next PEB. Everyone on the who’s who file will be notified and added as a participant.

EOSC 5b projects Task Forces

Majid is to be added to the ‘service onboarding’ TF and Thibaud to the ‘training’ one. The TF compositions will also be updated to replace Knut with Patrick (and/or Sophie). The first meeting of all the 5b projects collaboration task forces will take place before the 2nd week of February.

Meetings & events

2020/01/10 ESFRI task force on EOSC: The proposal to find a use-case to be presented during the next ESFRI and EOSC meeting in May will be detailed and submitted to the PEB via email for propositions.

2020/01/29-31 XFEL & DESY user meeting

2020/02/06 CB

Additionally, Brian mentioned an upcoming FAIRsFAIR plenary. It should be organised by the end of April and the agenda is currently being set. ExPaNDS (Brian) will likely be participating.

Status quo per WP

WP3

There will be a meeting next week to review the tasks and objectives of all WP3 participants. A F2F meeting with PaNOSC is also planned for February.

WP4

The telephone conference planned on the 22.01 will clarify the work for the coming weeks. A new recruit should also join WP4 soon for DESY.

WP6

Isabelle will be meeting Andy and J-F. Perrin from PaNOSC on the 26th of February to discuss the vision for ExpaNDS. 2 user meetings are being ‘investigated’ for an ExpaNDS participation: at LUND and at the IUCr. WP6 (Kat) will participate to DESY & XFEL user meeting along with Anton and Sophie, postcards are being drafted to be distributed then. An infographics video is also currently being made (it is due by the end of February). Finally WP6 encourages all partners to print and display an ExPaNDS poster in each of our facilities and present it. The poster in on SharePoint.

AOB

Brian informed his leaving FAIRsFAIR to focus on his other projects, someone else from UKRI will replace him.

🙋 Knut, Patrick, Sophie, Brian, Majid, Nazaré, Thibaud, Uwe, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Knut announced his leaving the project at the end of January. Patrick will succeed as ExPaNDS coordinator.

The following deliverables were delivered in December (the delivered version is available on ​ExPaNDS landing page​):

• Collaboration Agreement (1.11)
• Risk analysis (1.3)
• Internal communication plan (1.5)

The deliverables for next month are the project quality assurance plan (WP1 PSI) and the data management plan (WP1 DESY). The milestone linked to the quality assurance plan will need to be moved to fit the deadline for this deliverable.

Status quo per WP

WP1

The WP internal communication mailing lists are open to subscription, which will be notified to every project’s member. The other lists (mainly board lists) are administrated by WP1 so any request can be directly addressed to Sophie. Transforming the current stakeholders’ list into a ‘who’s who’ file which would contain e-mail address, list subscription and board membership is proposed for publication on the landing page. The ExPaNDS WP leads will be mentioned as contacts in the PaNOSC GitHub (​here​).

WP2

The results of the landscaping questionnaire were published at the end of December and are to be shared with Andy. The next important task is the common Data Policy issued by PaNOSC and for which a draft is soon to be shared with Brian and to WP2. If Andy consents, Brian will distribute it to all ExPaNDS WP.

WP4

Use cases for data analysis services are being defined (~6 independent use cases) based on PaNOSC works with the objective of being presented or consolidated during upcoming PaN user meetings (e.g. DESY user meeting and MAX IV-I if it is not too short a notice). The reference data sets are also being defined and a workshop with WP3 is to be scheduled to that purpose. The collaboration within the project needs to be reinforced on this important task, especially with HZDR and PaNOSC. WP1 will help ensure the mailing lists are up-to-date ASAP.

WP5

Nazaré introduced Thibaud Cayla as new member of the project, he will be highly involved in ExPaNDS for WP5 and 6. WP5 had a joint meeting with their PaNOSC counterparts on December, 10​th and will from now on have monthly meetings to precisely define the interface with the PaNOSC e-learning platform. They are planning for the next one to be a face to face meeting at the beginning of February.

WP6

Regular work carries on with WP leads and with PaNOSC. In particular, the will for a joint presence of both projects at user meetings is shared between WP6 and their PaNOSC counterpart. To enhance traffic on the ExPaNDS website it is reminded that all events of interest to users are to be mentioned to WP6. Finally a SharePoint space for the project has been developed and is ready for testing by all WP leads. A feedback from all ‘beta users’ is welcome ASAP with the objective of agreeing on a migrating from the landing page to it as soon as next PEB.

AOB

Concerning upcoming meetings, for which a common tool still needs to be put in place (action for WP1 with the help of WP6):

• 26-28 of February: Training session on EOSC for INFRA-EOSC 5b and cluster projects. WP5 and PaNOSC will be attending.
• 8-13 of March: Patrick will (briefly) present ExPaNDS at ISGC 2020 in Taipei. He will ask WP leads for technical input. WP6 mentioned existing presentations that could/should be used.

🙋 Knut, Sophie, Alun, Nazaré, Isabelle, Kat, Andy

Introduction

Deliverables have been discussed, especially the rescheduling of the two dedicated user meetings and the support to the development of the taxonomy strategy.

PaNOSC access to all deliverables, including the ´confidential´ ones, has been agreed.

Feedback from Knut and Andy about EOSC Symposium and coordination Day in Budapest.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Recent works mainly on Collaboration Agreement and deliverables; arrival of Sophie Servan who joined the team on December, 2nd.

WP3

Recent works mainly on survey with WP2 and PaNOSC which was sent; mailing list updated; workshop in January with PaNOSC to be organized.

WP5

Upcoming meeting with Thomas from PaNOSC to organize collaboration on platform and with EGI on how they could participate, both hopefully before the end of December.

WP6

Current audit on mail listings; the meetings with WP leaders carry on every week.

🙋 Knut, Brian, Anton, Nazaré, Isabelle

Introduction

Information about the PEB, overarching activities and collaborations have been presented (see link to related document at the end of these notes). It is seen as sensible when Volker, Mirjam or Mark participate at the relevant EOSC Symposium Meetings (Volker will be there anyhow).

The TC was nominated.

Status quo per WP

WP1

Mailing lists set up; D1.1 Human resource allocation is under preparation and needs input from project partners; INFRAEOSC 5 Collaboration agreement is still under discussion; INFRAEOSC 5 Cross Project Collaboration Board and the related task forces had the first meetings; new Project Manager (Sophie Servan) will start at 1 December; abstract about ExPaNDS submitted to the 'International Symposium on Grids and Clouds 2020' in Taipei.

WP2

Survey under preparation and coordinated with WP3 and PaNOSC; plan to submit it mid of November; Heike works on DMP; Brian gave a talk at the OpenScienceFair in Porto on ExPANDS; recruiting is ongoing; participating in the meeting of the FAIRsFAIR Synchronisation Task Force on 25 November in Budapest.

WP3

Alun provided written input via e-mail for WP2 to the topic “WP reports” (13. November 2019 9:31):

Activity	Date	Comment
ExPands Kick off	Sept 2019	Project start-up and
PaNOSC WP3 gathering	Sept 2019
Expands WP3 mailing list setup	End Oct 2019	Ongoing
PaNOSC Annual Meeting	4-7 Nov 2019	Including PaNOSC WP3 2 day breakout
Release of Joint WP2 & 3 questionnaire	Mid Nov 2019
Request for task responsibilities sent	Nov
Invited to HZB user meeting	Dec 2019	link
Joint WP2 and WP3 Landscape analysis	End Dec 2019
WP3 PaNOSC API and Data catalogue coordinating meeting	February 2020	Copenhagen/Lund (Tobias Richter will take lead)

WP4

Recruiting at DESY for WP4 successful; relevance of involving researchers has been stressed and the task to find appropriate data sets for testing; proposal to contact WP early to remind them on upcoming deliverables (6 months in advance).

WP5

Started working although core work phase starts in project month 12; set up mailing list; participated at PaNOSC Annual Meeting, will have a meeting with EGI and a WP5&WP6 joint meeting (feedback will provided after the meetings).

WP6

Kat Roarty joined the team as well as Emelie Hilner who participated in PANOSC Annual Meeting, participated in the INFRAEOSC 5 phone conference; plans to discuss training platforms with JISC; contacted Head of Communication at COM; got one feedback on deliverable “Communication Strategy…”; offered to shift 0.25 FTE to Soleil when needed, this will be discussed between Isabelle and Nazaré next week and feedback will be provided.

AOB

Deliveries have been discussed.

Approach to further work on risks and KPI has been made.