ePIC Collaboration Council Meeting
Minutes from last CC meeting on July 17, 2025 are available on the indico page of the respective meeting.
Minutes from the ePIC Council Meeting on November 7th, 2025.
Mode: Remote
Agenda: https://indico.bnl.gov/event/29048/
The following minutes refer to the agenda above and only record the discussion and questions not contained in the posted talks.
-
Welcome slides by Thomas
-
Opens the meeting and approves minutes from the July meeting (91% approve, 3% abstain, 7% proxy, 3% not council members).
-
After Thomas’ talk, Wouter makes the point that moving CC matters to protected status isn’t required by the charter and that many bodies have open meeting policies where notes are required to be published in a public space.
-
Wouter makes a motion to discuss moving all council matters to a protected indico, and therefore all documents/notes to protected status. Seconded by Rosi.
-
Thomas starts discussion with two points. First, in the current political climate, moving CC discussions to a protected space could also protect the collaboration and the scientific mission as a whole. Second, there are topics that are sensitive, for example the discussion of the survey. We are likely to have a more open and honest discussion if participants expect the discussions will be kept within the collaboration. Finally Thomas makes the point that its seems standard practice for collaborations to keep council matters within the collaboration.
-
Guido Maria agrees with Thomas and adds that all matters should be protected unless everyone in the council agrees to make them publicly available.
-
Wouter acknowledges that some matters will need to be protected. His point is that not all matters need to be protected and that perhaps it shouldn’t be the default mode.
-
Wouter also makes the point that the collaboration has benefited from being public facing in the past. It has allowed potentially new members to see what is going on in council meetings and to see if this is something they would like to join.This is harder to assess if everything is by default private.
-
John Lajoie clarifies that we are only discussing making CC indico protected, not all ePIC indico.
-
John adds that open meeting policies typically reference civic policy, where a meeting of elected officials discuss matters that affect the people that elected them. In our case the constituencies are the ePIC collaborators and all CC matters will be completely open to them. John also points out that CC meetings are a forum where we should have the ability to have discussions, post slides, and talk amongst ourselves without always being worried that perhaps something that gets posted or something that gets said will be misinterpreted or used in ways that are not intended. Keeping this information protected allows the CC to tackle complicated topics that don't necessarily belong exposed to the broader community.
-
Daniel Tapia suggests a compromise where we can designate open or private council meetings as needed.
-
Rene B. doesn’t think it would be appropriate to open council meetings up to the general public, to the entire collaboration yes, but not the general public. He doesn’t know of any collaboration that is entirely public.
-
Wouter calls a point of order to clarify that he doesn’t think just anyone should be able to attend the meetings, just that the indico pages should be public.
-
Ernst asks about the proposed 2-month timeline to move to fully protected and if all the people who should be able to access that information will in fact be able to access those pages. And if there is a period where people cannot access the pages then the disruption won’t go on for many months.
-
Thomas responds that directions on how to access the pages are on the ePIC website and that Eric will also talk about this in his upcoming talk. He acknowledges that it will require collaborators to walk through those steps and to be proactive about getting help when they are stuck or blocked in some way. Thomas says we can consider a relaxed timeline or perhaps just start by moving past meetings to protected indico (not future ones).
-
Sylvia notes that she thinks it is more important to have our physics and detectors available to the public than the CC meeting discussions.
-
Thomas asks for additional questions. Hearing no more discussion Thomas motions to close discussion and Ernst seconds.
-
Although unstated, it seems the conclusion of the discussion is that we will move to a protected indico for council matters and will try to facilitate the transition for collaborators.
-
Update from the spokesperson’s office by John
-
no additional discussion.
-
Membership Committee presentation by Eric
-
Sal asked if there are clear guidelines or criteria for who should be listed as an author on the membership survey
-
Eric responds that they have noticed different conventions from different groups and these need to be reviewed. He acknowledges that this needs to be clarified and will be addressed in a subsequent meeting.
-
Wouter asks about the CIlogin protocol and if it should work for everyone right now? And if not when? Wouter tried in real time to access the indico according to Eric’s slides and was unable to log in. Eric responded that probably Wouter wasn’t registered in Co-Manage but Wouter said he was and still couldn’t access. Renee F. noted that others had the same problem recently and it was solved by associating their ORICID with co-Manage.
-
Wouter raises the question about using ORCID and if it is necessary. There is some back and forth between Thomas U, Peter S and Wouter about if ORCID is really required to access a DOE facility. Frank G states that only users that are “registered” at a national lab need to have an ORCID. So if EPIC indeed wants all its users to be registered as a BNL guest then they need an ORCID id. But if there are EPIC that don’t need to register with BNL then ORCID is not a requirement.
-
Larry I. asks about registering his institution on coManage and Eric says to direct requests to him via email and he will help.