Telecon+009+of+December+5th,+2007

=USIC Meeting 2007-12-05=

Present:
Hal McAlister, Michelle Creech-Eakman, Charles Townes, Rachel Akeson, Don Hutter, Eric Bakker, Steve Ridgway and Theo ten Brummelaar (chair).

1: USIC Email and WiKi Pages.
The email address usic@chara-array.org has been established and tested.

The WiKi pages will be moved from PLOI to USIC and will have controlled access with parts globally visible and only members having access to edit the pages. This will involve a small cost, which CHARA has agreed to pay.

2(a): Up Coming Meetings: AAS Jan 2008
No poster abstract was submitted and it was agreed that since there will be a special interferometry session there was little point in doing so. Rachel suggests distributing the existing brochure. We agreed to do so at the special interferometry session and at the splinter group. All present will be attending the meeting accept Don, who tells us NPOI will be represented by someone else from USNO - Bob Zvala (sp?).

Steve notes that the form of the decadal committee is still unknown and that it may be announced at this meeting.

2(b): Up Coming Meetings: SPIE June 2008
As for the SPIE it was agreed that there is little point putting up a poster for a group of people already interested in the subject, though Michelle suggests we might put brochures around at other parts of the meeting.

Steve comments that the data collection for the decadal report will not go beyond a year after this meeting and by the time of this meeting any efforts towards the decadal report should be fully launched. This will be our last chance to engage, and solicit input from, the broader community. The idea is that we will at least have made those who do not participate aware of the effort and hopefully not feel they have been bypassed.

It was agreed that we should set up a small meeting at the SPIE, and that now was the time to contact the SPIE to set this up.

3(a): Interferometry Outreach: Review Article
There was general agreement that we should write an article summarizing the current state of Interferometry in a science magazine of broad distribution. Physics Today seemed to the be the logic choice, with the last such article appearing in 1991.

3(b): Interferometry Outreach: Power Point Summaries
achel commented that the existing resource was not complete and required editing before being useful in a general talk. Steve explained that it was quite an effort getting what there was and people are unlikely to be responsive to more requests for materials. After much discussion about the difficulty in extracting these materials it was agreed that we should all try and encourage our own collaborators to provide slides of this kind.

It was agreed that we ask the speakers at the AAS meeting to contribute a short set of highlight slides. Perhaps this should be extended to those presenting posters?

3(c): Interferometry Outreach: Meeting Visibility
Once again it was agreed that we need to be raising our profile at more general science meetings. It was agreed that at each USIC meeting one of us will provide a list of upcoming meetings that may be relevant and that we will all encourage our appropriate collaborators to attend these meetings. Steve had done this some time ago for OLBIN and this will make a good starting point for us.

4: AAS Splinter Meeting
There was much discussion on the topic of who we represent and if we can pretend to represent the US community, though we all agreed that we should be advancing the entire community if possible. Do we represent only our own instruments? Are we searching for a mandate at this meeting? Hal comments that we each have a large base of users and we do therefore represent more than our own instr