ITAC -- Cyber Meeting
October 18, 2002 -- 11:00am - 12:00n EDT

ITAC membership email abbreviation:  GS-W ITAC

Attendees:

Following is a list of expected ITAC meeting attendees/invitees accepted, declined, or delegating an alternate for the conference call:

Agenda:

• Review of Montgomery ITAC meeting Action Items
• Review of Action Items from previous meetings
• Discussion of 2003 goals
• New Business

Discussion Notes:

• Roll Call:   Jessie Alvarez (Notes taker), Tom Wood, Katherine Lins, Brian McCallum, Nelson Williams, Grady Moore, Scott McEwen, Colleen Babcock
• Review of Montgomery ITAC meeting Action Items

1. Action Item #1:   (IN PROGRESS) RCS to draft Home Computing guidelines. Scott has just sent out draft to ITAC and needs feedback from group. CA has been through this already and developed guidelines. Scott is incorporating their guidelines and ideas into his draft. CO also has a home support policy and he has include the link in the draft. Katherine wants us to stay in compliance with bureau policy. Scott is reading the flexi-place policy that addresses home computing. The bureau policy requires users bring computers into office for support. Grady mentioned that the NY policy is that users use government computers. They pay for ISDN line. Katherine says this makes sense for people that do it frequently but what about the ad hoc user?
2. Action Item #2:   Review of Goals (DONE) Brian sent it out to ITAC and the group approved the goal. No changes were suggested.
3. Action Item #3:   DONE.
4. Action Item #4:   HASS feedback -- Jessie emailed Audrey Ishii and is waiting for her reply. Sonja was also gathering input form field.

Katherine: Senior staff believes they have dealt with this by giving responsibility to disciplines. Lorna is working in a draft so that WRD can put pressure on the disciplines. I no longer have a unit to provide this support. I think it is important for Senior Staff to understand ramifications of their decision. There is a new team, Science Support Review Team, to handle these issues. Bill Sexton is the chair. (Bill Alley opinion is that if you develop a model you should support it but NRP does not want to do this, they do not have the support staff.) We will end up with varying levels of support now that disciplines have to support models.

Scott: It's going to take lots of attention. He likes Sonja's approach; she alerts the disciplines when they put a report out referencing a specific model. The disciplines have to work with the authors of the models to make sure documentation is in place and updates are made available on the HASS page.

Somebody at NRP needs to get grounded as to what is going on out in the filed in regard to these models.

Modification to action item #4:   I should send Ishii's feed back to Bill Sexton with cc Katherine Lins and Bob Hirsh instead of just sending this feedback to Katherine.

5. Action Item #5:   NO PROGRESS to report. NWIS has not had time to address it. Colleen: The group will definitely brainstorm this. Jessie requested they at least spend 15 minutes brainstorming or she could email the group for feedback on the approach she suggested to Susan. Colleen will pass on the concern to NWIS.
6. Action Item #6:   PENDING
7. Action Item #7 Site Admin Training. (IN PROGRESS) Jessie: I got feed back from Scott, Graig McHendrie and Nelson. Need to incorporate on their comments to make it final. Grady said that his Comp unit looked it over and though it was good. Modify action item to show that final guidelines should go to DCs in addition to SAs.
8. Action Item #8:   DBA training (PENDING)

Scott:   has been talking to Joe. They will work on it as soon as NWIS 4.2 conversion is done. Scott asked Colleen if the goal is to develop training for DBA. She agrees that this issue is on their radar screen. They hope to spread out the load of putting this training together. Colleen does not know how much time Greg Shank will have to work on this because his top priority is to handle NWISRT implementation. Colleen needs to find someone other than Greg to teach the course. She has someone in mind but has not discussed it with the person.

9. Action Item #9:   Scott's part is DONE. The second part of this action item was for Alan Lumb to distribute the NWIS DBA duties that Scott found. Modify action item so that Susan takes this new action item and distribute to A & B, DC, CD, NWIS DBAs and ADs.

   Nelson: The reason this document is written up was because Districts had lost their DBAs and DCs did not know what to put in the PDs of the new DBAs. The list Scott found is up to date and still applicable. The email Susan sends out should point out the importance of having a DBA at each district specially now that NWIS involves many user access a file aging issues.

10. Action Item #10:   (COMPLETE for FY03) No plans for 04, this issue will come up again.
11. Action Item #11:   NO PROGRESS to report. Loren was not available for this con-call…pending.
12. Action Item #12:   DONE. Tom said that the problem with piper plots is fixed in 4.2. Reference his email.
13. Action Item #13:   DONE. Scott will find email and forward to Jessie to include in notes. SWTAT.

Most of us think that SWSTAT should only read flat files and not DWM files but this is not going to be taken out of the program.

14. Action Item #14:   DONE.
15. Action Item #15:   DONE. Feedback from group was that no changes needed to be made.
16. Action Item #16:   DONE. Find email from Tom. Caroline will train someone but this will be a Bureau level position. Neil Mark will probably take on that responsibility once Carol retires. Scott asked that this info be sent to Program officers. They need to know who handles non-standard GSA. Grady said he recently received this info from Katherine.

Katherine:   More guidelines should be coming out soon.

17. Action Item #17 (IN PROGRESS) Tom has recently revised the chart to include links to technical teams. No team members are listed but it shows the matrix.

Do we want to see the list of members? This action item was for the benefit of ITAC in case we have to explain it to others. Katherine suggested this chart be posted on ITAC web page so that we can point the GIOs and Regions and other disciplines to this page.

18. Action Item #18:   DONE.
19. Action Item #19:   IN PROGRESS. Jessie: I sent out the ER IT plan to ITAC twice and have not received feedback. Last chance to comment is next week, the final plan will be presented to ERLT early November. You may skip the introduction and go straight to the problems and recommendations part. Let me know if any "issues/problems" have been overlooked or if you do not agree with any of the recommendations.
20. Action Item #20:   IN PROGRESS. Jessie: I have a 2 page draft that will be sent out to RCSers and the security team by the end of the day.
21. Action Item #21 THIS ACTION ITEM IS UNCLEAR and should be reworded or scrapped and a new AI created. ITAC was going to put together a document explaining what moving a document to Natweb involves. Some material is already in place on Natweb page. This should be an agenda item for our next meeting. How do we promote the use of Natweb servers? Nelson volunteered to take the lead on this action item. Nelson will take the lead on developing a position paper.
22. Action Item #22 PENDING, to be completed on Tuesday Oct. 22nd. Charlie will give presentation instead of Mike.

Katherine: Mike provided slides from the last presentation and Charlie is working on it.

• Review of Action Items from previous meetings

1. July 2002 cyber #6:   COMPLETE. Assuming the two offices will come up with the money. Scott asked that Katherine let us know when the money transfer occurs. Scott suggested this action should fall under the NWIS umbrella.

Katherine:   The NWIS ESC discussed this and decided this was the responsibility of the 2 discipline offices. GCLASS will remain with the discipline offices.

2. June2002 #2:   COMPLETE. Ernie did not compose a letter but the communications occurred at a meeting with NDES. Ernie has been posting updates on his web page. Not all problems are fixed, this is an ongoing issue. Colleen will ask Ernie to post a status update.
3. June2002 #3:   PENDING but will be complete by Tuesday, October 22 by Charlie.
• Discussion of 2003 goals

1. 2003 goals for ITAC: Brian proposed we start reviewing and define goals for fy03. The 2002 goals listed in Oct email he sent out seem to be ongoing. What we need to do is review the sub bullets to define our short-term goals.
2. NEW Action item for ITAC- endure 2002 goals and provide modifications/ideas for sub-goals for 03. Also provide ideas for any new goals.
• New Business

1. Determine date of next meeting.

NEW Action item (Oct2002.Cyber.1):   Brian will poll group to find out best date for next meeting. January 14-16, February 11-13, or February 19-21.

2. We need more info on the DOI MS contract.

NEW Action (Oct2002.Cyber.2):   Tom will report on DOI MS contract at next conference-call.

3. If Computer specialist are not converted to the new 2210 series by January they could lose their pay increase for IT special rate salary. Districts need to at least have the FPPS action in place for each Computer Specialist by next week, October 25.

NEW Action (Oct2002.Cyber.3):   Scott will send email to RCSers to contact HR to find out which districts have not converted their employees and notify appropriate DCs. Scott will cc the RGIOs so that they can notify other disciplines.

Action Items:

Legend for AI Identifier:   Oct2002.Cyber.1 = month, year, location, & action item number for each ITAC meeting.


AI Identifier	Person(s) Assigned / Description of Action Item / Status of AI/Comment
Oct2002.Cyber.1 COMPLETED	Person(s) Assigned:  Brian McCullum Description of Action Item:   Brian will poll group to find out best date for next meeting. January 14-16, February 11-13, or February 19-21. Status of AI/Comment:
Oct2002.Cyber.2 COMPLETED	Person(s) Assigned:  Tom Wood Description of Action Item:   Tom will report on DOI MS contract at next conference-call. Status of AI/Comment:   Completed Reference Tom's draft note, Subject:   Update on Microsoft Enterprise License
Oct2002.Cyber.3 COMPLETED	Person(s) Assigned:  Scott McEwen Description of Action Item:   Scott will send email to RCSers to contact HR to find out which districts have not converted their employees and notify appropriate DCs. Scott will cc the RGIOs so that they can notify other disciplines. Status of AI/Comment:   Completed