Dear Dmitry,
On Tue, 11 Aug 2020, Dmitry Bisikalo wrote:
With this letter, we kindly ask for your view on the format this meeting should take and how it should be organized. Specifically, we ask you to answer the following questions.
You have omitted the most important question:
0. What practical and ethical guidelines do you recommend for (i) the software and (ii) the hosting services to use for the online meeting?
Could you please send this question to Commission B1 members? Thank you in advance. My answers are below.
- Would you be interested in participating in such a meeting and in
giving a talk? If yes, please, provide a (very preliminary) title of your presentation.
Tentatively, yes:
"A galaxy formation software pipeline aiming at full reproducibility on any POSIX-compatible operating system"
- Which way of giving a talk would be more suitable for you, live
presentations or pre-recorded ones?
I see little point in pre-recorded presentations - conferences are most useful for their interactive aspects.
Should we include only short contributed talks in the program or will some more extended review talks also be helpful?
I think that reviews should be proposed as drafts on any git repository satisfying IAU ethical guidelines. (Repositories that forbid access to scientists based on their nationality or geographical location are disqualified under IAU anti-discrimination guidelines; this disqualifies github and bitbucket.)
- Should we plan a special session limited to topical discussions?
Can you suggest some issues to be discussed at the session?
A topical discussion on reproducibility, free licensing and long-term sustainable astronomy software development would be very useful. Too many astronomers choose "direct action" - we publish software on a git repository with a fuzzy licence (or an absent licence, i.e. the Berne convention, which forbids copying, modification and redistribution) and ignore the question of long-term integration of astronomy software into the wider free-software and open-source-definition-software (FOSS) environment.
Question 0 for Commission B1 members:
What practical and ethical guidelines do you recommend for (i) the software and (ii) the hosting services to use for the online meeting?
0.(i) The conferencing software must be free-licensed, with a licence satisfying either the free software definition or the open source definition.
The software must use open protocols that are compatible with free-software licences and that do not restrict astronomers to any particular vendors (corporations or citizens' associations or individual hosters).
Practical videoconferencing possibilities include bigbluebutton (bbb), jitsi, jami [1], the matrix protocol (with a front end such as element.io) [2], and irc (well-tested over many decades and highly efficient).
0.(ii) The hosting services should (1) allow the astronomers using the service to install the conferencing software on their own servers, e.g. at their research institute; (2) allow wide interoperability with equivalent services; (3) allow easy and practical export of the astronomers' stored data from that particular service; (4) must not require the astronomer to install any unverifiable (e.g. binary) software on his/her computer. These reasons are all practical rather than ethical.
Criteria (i) + (ii) imply that Zoom and Slack are excluded, because they violate most of the practical constraints (1)-(4). Moreover, the ethical violation with using Zoom or Slack (or MS Teams or an equivalent Google service) is that "the astronomer is the product to be sold to advertisers". Astronomy, especially in the context of the IAU, is meant to be an inspiration and example to the world. We should not give the wider public the bad example of humans becoming products to be sold to advertisers.
For more details on bbb/jitsi/jami/matrix, see
[1] https://switching.software/replace/zoom
[2] https://switching.software/replace/slack
For more details on the overall answers and the IAU's practical and ethical considerations to take into account for question 0, see
[3] https://cosmo.torun.pl/blog/slack_zoom_prison .
Since we believe that a preference should be given to young scientists (PHD students, young PHDs within three years after the defense), we would be grateful if you spread this information among young researchers in your home institution.
The easiest way to do this is with a conventional mailing list, so I'm cc-ing this answer to our local publicly archived mailing list. I see nothing private in your questions, and after all, the IAU is a network of citizens' associations, so we really should be shifting to fully public, transparent, rational discussion. Commission B1 - Computational Astrophysics [4] - has even less justification for secrecy than any other part of the IAU! :)
We will be grateful to receive your responses by 1st September, 2020. And do not forget that the IAU Symposium 362 is not cancelled but just postponed till June 2021!
Yours sincerely, Members of the IAU Commission B1 Organizing Committee
Regards Boud
[4] https://www.iau.org/science/scientific_bodies/commissions/B1/