PyHC project status, February 2021

We hosted a virtual PyHC poster session at the virtual AGU 2020 meeting on December 8, 2020. Poster authors were given the option to choose an hour or two time frame that they’ll be available for comments, questions, etc. Overall, authors were not overly fond of the virtual format, and felt poster sessions were fairly isolated with little-to-no interaction (as a result of the poster session format). Additionally, communication between AGU and session chairs/conveners was lacking. We are currently in the process of planning the sixth, and third fully-virtual, PyHC meeting. Based on results from a poll sent to PyHC members, as well as taking into consideration other meetings/conferences, the PyHC spring 2021 meeting will take place May 10-13, 2021 (on the Zoom platform). Each day will span two hours (9 - 11 AM MT). The meeting will cover core project updates, as well as relevant tutorials, hackathons, and other TBD topics. Planning materials for the meeting can be found on the PyHC Google Drive.

We continued to hold biweekly telecons after a hiatus in December for the holidays. In the first telecon of 2021, Ian Cosden gave a presentation about the US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE), as well as the INTERSECT project. Since then, we’ve held three telecons centered around introductory presentations from new HDEE projects and related questions from members of PyHC. Several more updates were made to the PyHC website during this quarter, as well. Updates included the following:

  1. A meeting report for the fall 2020 meeting was added to the Meetings page.
  2. An acknowledgements page was created (which gives credit to Dayana Gonzalez for creating the PyHC logo, as well as NASA for funding PyHC).
  3. Quarterly reports, such as this one, were added to the PyHC website (linked on the Documents page).
  4. The PyHC mission statement and strategic goals were added to the main page, and the code of conduct was added to the Documents page.
  5. A package review template was added (for use in PyHC project self evaluations).
  6. Instructions for joining the PyHC mailing list were updated (on the Contact page).
  7. The Projects page was updated to include taxonomy drop-down filters.