Minutes of ns-3 Consortium Steering Committee telecon May 12, 2016 Attendees: Walid Dabbous, Lorenza Giupponi, Tom Henderson, Felipe Perrone, Manuel Ricardo, George Riley Meeting chaired and minutes recorded by Tom Henderson. Decisions taken: ---------------- Tom Henderson was re-appointed Executive Director for 2016. Annual Report of ns-3 Consortium for 2015 was approved. Several expenses related to upcoming annual meeting, and to project infrastructure, were approved. Action items: ------------- 1) Tom to post annual report to the webserver 2) Tom to obtain estimates for updating nsnam.org Wordpress theme to be more mobile friendly, and circulate information to Steering Committee for consideration. 3) George to investigate costs associated with the Consortium obtaining an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account to experiment with using HPC services, possibly to write a tutorial for users on how to do this 4) Tom to investigate cash bar possibility for WNS3 poster/demo session 5) Tom to circulate slides for annual meeting of the Consortium prior to the Thursday June 16 event Expenses approved: ------------------ 1) Web site domain renewal (~$50) 2) Web site security service subscription (~$100/year) 3) Food (lunches, cofee) for annual meeting events (TBD) 4) thumbdrives for distributing meeting proceedings (~$150) 5) screencasting software and microphone for desktop recording (~$150) 6) gifts for annual meeting (~$150) 7) dinner/social for maintainers at annual meeting (TBD) Agenda and discussion: ---------------------- 1. Administrative The following issues were discussed. - Approval of annual report for 2015 The meeting approved the report. - 2015 budget report Reviewed, and changes expected for 2016 were discussed. - Membership status NITK Surathkal recently joined as a regular member. LLNL is in the process of renewing membership. - Executive Director position for 2015 and beyond Tom Henderson agreed to serve another year as Executive Director and was formally approved by a motion from the meeting participantes. - Summer students and open source project status The project expects one summer student from ESA Summer of Code in Space program, and three voluntary students working with Mohit Tahiliani. 2. Infrastructure - Web site domain renewal In process of renewing. - Web site security Tom suggested, and meeting approved, the purchase of security services to strengthen our site security. - Web site theme update Tom suggested exploring whether we can replace or modify our existing static web site theme to be more mobile-friendly, and will ask for some bids on the work. - Git hosting possibility Tom mentioned that we have had more maintainers partial to using git (rather than mercurial) join the project recently, and that we may want to consider again the transition to git hosting including possibly github hosting. This may be a topic at the annual meeting. - AWS account Tom sought approval to use Consortium funds to obtain an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account to support exploration of the use of HPC. George cautioned that expenses could get out of hand and offered to survey his colleages about their experiences with AWS. The meeting agreed to defer this until more cost information was obtained. 3. Annual meeting administrative - Budget review and planned expenditures The annual meeting is expected to provide increased income over last year, due to higher number of training registrations. Expenditures are expected to be reduced due to lower travel and travel grant costs. Although about 20 people have expressed interest in live stream of the events, Tom decided that the expenses for official UW streaming support were too high, and instead plans to do some screen/audio recording and posting of the sessions on a best-effort basis. Tom discussed that the current Consortium accounts are not approved for alcoholic beverage purchase (for the poster/demo session). George suggested an alternative of a cash bar; Tom will look into this. The meeting approved spending some Consortium funding on gifts for the TPC co-chairs, and reimbursement of a dinner for maintainers who attend the annual meeting. Other planned meeting expenses include food (lunch and coffee), thumb drives for distributing the workshop proceedings, one travel grant ($500) for a summer student paper, and $500 for the ACM ICPS proceedings published in the digital library. Site/date selection confirmed for 2017 (Porto, 12-16 June 2017). Future years are open at this time. A TPC co-chair will be needed for 2017-18 to replace Hajime Tazaki who will rotate off. 4. Preview/agenda for June 16 Consortium annual meeting (open meeting, Thurs June 16, 2pm Seattle time) No additional items were raised for discussion. Tom volunteered to post some advance slides of the Consortium open meeting presentation in advance of that meeting.