Facilities Representatives Discussion Group

Participants

• Peter Boesecke (ESRF)
• Paul Butler (NIST)
• Daniel Clemens (Germany)
• Charles Dewhurst (ILL)
• Eliott Gilbert (ANSTO)
• Rex Hjelm (LANSCE)
• Pete Jemian (APS)
• Steve King (ISIS)
• Ken Littrell (ORNL)
• Adrian Rennie (Users)
• Nick Terrill (Diamond)

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News/Status

• Nov 18, 2009 - Second meeting convened -- Agenda available
• Aug 19, 2009 - First meeting convened -- minutes available
• Nov 2008 - After the workshop, it became clear that not only were there a significant number of facilities from the meeting who wanted to participate, but quite a number of facilities that were unable to attend were mentioned as important to have particpate. This raises the question of how best to proceed. A tele/video conference with that many nodes and people is not likely to be productive, yet reducing representation seems to defeat the purpose of the group. Some suggestions so far are:
  • divide into subgroups of no more than 6 or 7 (probably high for a vido link and a bit high for real discussions). This would require some kind of uber group to facilitate the communication between groups. Two possiblities are:
    • Make up of groups is set radomly. Each group would then presumably choose a representative to the uber group. Advantage is the encouragement of cross region fertilization. Disadvantage is that regional groups might be useful in themselves for discussion of purely regional issues.
    • Regional groups are formed with the uber group having a representative from each of the regional groups
  • Keep one large group but have presentation led disucussions to stimulate discussion. This would require much more off line effort and still not allow quite the same kind of rapid development of ideas and issues, but would keep everyone together.
• Nov 2008 - Paul Butler will need to contact the current members and discuss the best way to proceed. This may involve a teleconference of the current particpants. This item will be taken up in early January