Tripal Advisory Committee Meeting 2021/5/04

Meeting Date
Attendees

Sean Buehler, UTK, i5k
Jill Wegrzyn, TreeGenes
Meg Staton, Hardwood Genomics
Stephen Ficklin, Katheryn Buble, WSU
Valentin Guignon, The Alliance Bioversity-CIAT (CGIAR)
Risharde Ramnath, TreeGenes / WSU
Monica Poelchau, USDA-ARS-NAL, i5k
Blake Inderski, USDA
Irene Cobo Simon, TreeGenes/CartograPlant
Lilia Mesina, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Rodrigo Ortega Polo, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Lacey-Anne Sanderson, University of Saskatchewan

Agenda

  1. White paper came back with only minor revisions! Yea!
  2. Stephen is spearheading a new grant
    • NSF SABI (https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2021/nsf21503/nsf21503.htm
    • specifically funds ongoing efforts rather than new functionality
    • help support our efforts to upgrade Tripal and all our Extension modules to Drupal 8/9.
    • Need help from everyone to show research and education impact
      • Training - grad students,postdocs, undergrads
      • Publications
      • Site Usage
    • Can an outreach and training person be supported by this? Sustainability is part of the grant, so likely will fit
  3. How can we increase involvement of developers in core development? And also increase the involvement of community members?
    • Why are we losing interested groups?
    • How do we get people who are working on overlapping projects to work together?
    • More organized outreach, more frequent hackathons
    • Find top 3-4 modules that everyone needs, then focus the community on those with once a month hackathons, make it fun and interactive and make these modules really awesome and fit everyone's needs
      • Weekly coding get together falls into this - this is not for developers only! Inclusive for anyone in the community
      • Perhaps be more targeted - set aside part of dev meeting for a specific issue - 
      • Might need separate meetings timed around everyone’s schedule but this is extra overhead
      • Asynchronous code fest where each person works independently? More flexible but missing the good discussion
      • recording our meetings and get it searchable maybe on YouTube platform or vimeo with comments enables, can get training material out there
      • Advocacy for Tripal is important to get new groups and keep enthusiasm going
        1. Could we set up a google form for presentations and trainings? Auto display on website?
      • Could part of the problem be that initiatives/projects undertaken by a single group generally don't get collaborators after the fact? Place more emphasis on linking groups together before project development starts
        1. Get groups to share a DB - a group can develop a new module they need but have it installed on an existing database
      • Stephen - will make “Before you start” guide to user docs to help people find what they need
      • Fill out a form about new modules w/ design spec
        1. Also put out over slack and twitter for feedback
      • Newsletter? Once a quarter? Solicit items through a form
      • Start using CoFest
      • Support for more community standards:  
        1. Alliance for genome resources APIs.
        2. Presenting more  at ISMB/BOSC. Perhaps we should start
  4. BOSC abstracts due in 2 days
    •  
  5. Bioinfo core at ISMB
Meeting Type