Minutes of ENBES Steering Committee (SC) Meeting – 19th August 2014

Present: Daniel Assoulin, Mojca Bavdaž, Deirdre Giesen, WimKloek, JacekKowalewski, Boris Lorenc (chair),Ria Sanderson (minutes), Li-Chun Zhang.

1. Agenda

We started by agreeing to cover the following items in the agenda:

  • Financial update
  • Progress on workshop on unit problem
  • Update from the working groups
  • RSS conference session
  • Using the cros-portal
  • ICES-V list of topics and relevance of unit problem

2. Financial update

Wim gave an update on the financial situation. CBS (Netherlands) have agreed to sponsor the EESW15 workshop, so the number of sponsors is now three. Wim is discussing whether sponsorship will be available from Eurostat.

3. Unit problem workshop

We discussed plans for the “unit problem” workshop in November. During the meeting, Boris sent a link to material on the cros-portal that describes the workshop.

a. Dates

We agreed a date of 10th November for the workshop.

b. Participants

There will be 7-8 presenters. There was further discussion about possible presenters and an acknowledgment that we would also like representation from the organisational side in addition to representation from official statistics.

c. ICES-V

Boris and Daniel identified that it is worth sharing the details of the workshop with the ICES-V committee to consider whether it would be of interest for the topic list of ICES-V.

d. Communications

The next step is to work on announcing the workshop. Wim noted that the arrangements for registration and practical information about hotels and travel will need to be available before the workshop is announced. Boris will discuss these arrangements with the workshop venue this week.

The workshop will be announced in the next couple of weeks through the ENBES mailing list and will also require some material to be added to the ENBES wiki. We discussed how to encourage co-operation from academia where the unit problem is not very well established as a research topic.

4. RSS conference session

We discussed the upcoming ENBES session at the RSS conference in early September. Mojca identified that this is an opportunity to inform participants about the workshop in November and EESW15 and the general purpose of ENBES. Deirdre suggested an opening slide and to ask the chair of the session to say a few words about ENBES at the start of the session.

Copies of the ENBES leaflet will also be made available. The printing will need to be completed by the end of August so any further materials for the workshop need to be prepared before then (for example, Wim indicated that the call for papers for EESW15 may be available).

5. Cros-portal

We discussed the cros-portal. Mojca indicated that it is not very user friendly to upload and link documents, and she was also having trouble editing pages that others had created. During the meeting, Wim changed Mojca’s access level and she agreed to make some updates to the pages containing the agendas and minutes of the Steering Committee. Boris suggested that filenames, if they have dates in them,give them in year-month-day format, so that sorting files alphabetically also preserved the time order.

6. Next meeting

We agreed the date of the next SC meeting, which will be on 16th September 2014 at 11:00 CEST (10:00 BST).