SLUO Executive Committee Meeting Minutes April 10, 2000 Present: Gerard Bonneaud, Ben Brau, Chris Damerell, Riccardo DeSangro, Ray Frey, Fran Kaufmann, Neil Geddes, Tom Glanzman, Janis McKenna, Tania McMahon, Tricia Rankin, Natalie Roe, Charlie Young Report from the Chair The SLAC DOE Institutional Review was held at SLAC on April 4-5, 2000. Ray Frey gave a presentation on behalf of SLUO. The primary concern he addressed was housing costs for visiting researchers. He also highlighted the recent Washington visit in which 8 SLUO members joined 15 Fermilab users to visit more than 60 Congressional offices as well as OSTP and OMB. The primary message they brought was the shortage of operating funds in the Presidentís budget for FY01. This shortfall will hamper full exploitation of the new facilities at both SLAC and FNAL if it is not addressed in the budget process. Ray also reported that the annual DPF/DNP congressional reception will be held in Washington on May 16th this year; SLUO hopes to send 1 or 2 people to this event as well. The SLUO Annual Meeting will be held on Friday, July 7 this year and will be primarily a forum for the HEPAP mini- panel. Fran Kaufmann is now in charge of the SLUO office, replacing Ree Dufresne who recently retired from SLAC. Nicole Minieri is Fran's temporary full-time assistant and staffs the office on Tuesdays when Fran is out. User Lodging Committee Chris Damerell reported on the activities of the User Lodging Feasibility Committee (ULFC), on which he serves as the SLUO representative. A final report is in draft form, and Chris provided a summary of the findings. In short, a strong case is made for the construction of on-site user lodging. A housing survey has also been conducted to ascertain user interest in such a facility. Over 400 users returned the survey; with over 97% indicating that they would prefer to stay in on-site lodging if it were available at a competitive price. Because the survey results were available too late to be included in the final report of the ULFC, Chris proposed and the committee agreed that it would be useful for the SLUO executive committee to prepare an executive summary of the user survey results. Chris agreed to draft this document. Graduate Student Issues Ben Brau reported there was another BaBar graduate student lunch, which was very well attended. He suggested that graduate student lunches be combined with the planned lecture series on statistical methods. Ben has made contact with members of the FNAL Graduate Student Association. They have offered to provide him with assistance to start a similar organization at SLAC. Jonathan Dorfan has promised to support this activity. Fran will assist Ben in obtaining an email distribution list of graduate students working at SLAC and SSRL. Outreach Riccardo DeSangro showed the committee a proposed web page to handle suggestions from users. This Suggestion Box will be linked to the SLUO home page and will allow users to provide direct input to the SLUO executive committee. Tom Glanzman offered to help set up an archiving mechanism. Space/Conference Rooms Tania McMahon reported that the new Research Office building is approved and final plans are being drawn up. The new building will be located adjacent to the A&E building and will provide office space for over 100 users and 40 SLAC employees, in addition to a large conference facility. Construction is scheduled to start in June 2000 with occupancy in the fall of 2001. The mix of open vs closed office space is still being discussed, and convenient parking is also an issue. Charlie Young reported that Tom Himel has approved his request to upgrade the Orange room with an audio conferencing and projection system based on an original estimated cost of approimately. $20k. The project went out for bid and came back much higher (the company that provided the original estimated declined to bid). Less expensive alternatives are now being considered. Tom Glanzman is in contact with Argonne National Lab, where they have rooms dedicated to ìcollaborative conversationsî that employ room mikes, video and projection equipment that can be configured on the fly. An audio mixer provides sound adjustment for optimum performance. Tom will investigate further and provide input on the best choice of audio equipment. Computing: Nothing to report. SLUO office report Fran introduced her temporary assistant, Nicole Minieri. Nicole staffs the SLUO desk on Tuesdays and will provide full-time support until the position is filled. They are still maintaining two databases, though automatic binkey assignment to both SLUO and System Identification Database (SID) is being tested and should be operational soon. Database integrity should be better once the two systems are merged. Eventually, ES&H will join the same database system. Safety training during major user events is still sometimes a problem; for example during a recent BaBar physics week 7 people signed up in advance for safety training, but 10 are required to hold a class. Fran will be meeting with OHP, at their request, to discuss scheduling of safety training to coincide with user meetings, in an attempt to get more people to sign up ahead of time. Communications Task Force Jonathan Dorfan has established a Communications Task Force consisting of 3 committees meant to address a variety of communication issues. Helen Quinn provided a summary of the charge for the committee she chairs, which includes communication with users, community groups and science education and political outreach. Helen would like to know what kind of information users would like to receive, and how SLAC can help users in contacts with their political representatives. Some ideas that were discussed included mailing the url for new issues of the Beamline to users and providing a monthly SLUO email to users that would include headlines of interesting items together with urls for more information. A web page to summarize political issues and links from the SLUO home page was also proposed. Lunch with Directorate Tom Himel and PA Moore were present. Jonathan Dorfan was in Washington and Steve Williams was out. Tom reported that the reviewers at the SLAC institutional DOE review were very impressed with the rapid turn-on of PEP-II, though concern was expressed over the rising computing costs for BaBar. All in all it was a very positive review. A vacuum leak in PEP-II occurred last week. A temporary fix is in place but there is concern it will get worse. Current in the HER is being limited to avoid stressing the afflicted joint; this limits the luminosity to half of the design value. A permanent repair will be made during the September shutdown. GLAST has been approved. The DOE budget is $35M over 5 years. The instrumentation will be assembled in the LAB. The GLAST central office will be located in the Warehouse. Annual Meeting Ideas were discussed for talks at the Annual Meeting, which will be held on Friday, July 7th, preceding the BaBar collaboration meeting the following week. The HEPAP mini- panel will visit SLAC on this day and about half of the dayís presentations will be addressed towards their charge to evaluate future directions for HEP.