Minutes of ns-3 Steering Committee telecon September 16, 2014 Attendees: Nicola Baldo, Walid Dabbous, Tom Henderson, Felipe Perrone, Manuel Ricardo, George Riley 1) Google Summer of Code and ESA Summer of Code in Space The steering committee was updated on the outcome of summer student projects. ns-3 had five officially sponsored summer projects, and two unofficial projects. Tom will be receiving $2000 from Google which will be deposited in the UW consortium gift account. Tom sought and obtained approval to use a portion of this funding for the purchase and mailing of project polo shirts to mentors and students. Nicola and Tom will represent ns-3 at the GSoC mentor summit in San Jose at the end of October, and will also attend a meeting at LLNL with George Riley and Peter Barnes. 2) Infrastructure Tom briefly reviewed the status of project web infrastructure. Presently, we have two VMware virtual machines at Georgia Tech (www.nsnam.org and code.nsnam.org) and a Jenkins server at UW (ns-buildmaster). We recently had a 24-hour outage of the main web site due to this occurring on a day on which no Georgia Tech support was available. George and Tom discussed what to do in the future to minimize downtime, and Tom offered to stand up a mirror site at UW (perhaps read-only recent backups of wiki and bugzilla database, and static web content). Tom looked into managed hosting as a solution, but the monthly costs are very high. Tom asked if there were other ideas or suggestions in this regard, and there were none expressed. 3) Membership The term on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's membership is up, and Tom offered to draft a letter extending the membership to the end of 2014 and requesting that they continue in 2015. There were no new ideas/suggestions for prospective members. 4) Executive Director Tom's second term as Executive Director is expiring at the end of the calendar year, and the meeting discussed the process to select a new one. Walid asked about checking the consortium agreement to review the criteria for the Executive Director. Tom said that the document just states that "the Executive Director will rotate between Executive Members" but it does not impose term limits or other criteria. The meeting agreed to consider other candidates, or to default to another appointment for Tom. Tom said that he was willing to serve another term but wanted to provide the opportunity for anyone else interested to fill the role. Walid suggested to revisit this after three weeks time and to socialize any other candidates between now and then. 5) WNS3-2015 planning Nicola and CTTC have invited us to hold WNS3 in May. Nicola clarified that CTTC has an auditorium to seat 80 people, and video recording capabilities (although no editing services), and could offer the facility at no cost. He also clarified that the only condition was that CTTC bear no financial responsibility for expenses. The meeting agreed to accept this invitation and discussed potential weeks in May. There was not a consensus on a clear best week for everyone, and Tom noted that schedules of others ought to be considered, so he suggested to email also the attendees of last year's WNS3 and the maintainers to solicit feedback on good or bad dates, and then make a selection based on the feedback provided. Peter Barnes has offered to stay on for a second year as TPC co-chair if we can find another who can serve for two years starting in 2015. We discussed this and sentiment was expressed that the two year commitment may become a barrier in finding co-chairs. Tom suggested that perhaps it could be softened as an offer to serve for two years but not a requirement. Again, the meeting discussed that the steering committee ought to solicit candidates to consider at a future discussion. Felipe Perrone has advised that we should separately find a "Proceedings Chair" to deal with the issues surrounding ACM DL publication. Because there are only twelve or so papers, the job is not huge but it requires some attention to detail. Felipe agreed to write up a brief description of the job to help prospective candidates consider it. Regarding any further discussion on what to do differently next year, Tom suggested earlier more aggressive publicity would help, and Felipe suggested announcing on the ACM SIGSIM mailing list would possibly help. Felipe also brought up the possibility to expand the scope of the call for papers, to include also a second or parallel track for "applications of ns-3" rather than just about the software development of the tool itself. Tom suggested to revisit this once we have the TPC chairs in place. 6) any other business Tom suggested to have another telecon in three or four weeks time to discuss WNS3 chairs, Executive Director, and other agenda items not covered today including future training sessions. Walid noted that INRIA will provide a DCE demo at the MSWiM conference at the end of September.