Is a memorandum of understanding required?

[tomarnoldess]

During the workshop there was a difference of opinion about whether a memorandum of understanding is necessary. The purpose of this would be to secure formal support from the facilities management to ensure that time spent on ORSO activities is valued.

[tomarnoldess]

Unless there is some strong support for writing this, I suggest that we do not. Please comment either way

[wpotrzebowski]

I think some kind of formal contribution agreement may be useful when ORSO will apply for funding. We recently applied with SasView for funding to support open software project and there was a question about contributor code of conduct. It wasn't required but still a plus. You can find relevant discussion for SasView at https://github.com/SasView/sasview/wiki/DevNotes_DevGuide_CodeOfConduct.

[jfkcooper]

I like the idea, and think it has many benefits for the organisation, though may be tricky to actually extract from a lot of facilities.

Formal facility support may make working on collaborative ORSO projects for some people, and as @wpotrzebowski said, funding may also be easier to acquire.

It may be a thing which would be easier to get after more ORSO work (e.g. the organisation having survived long enough to be taken notice of), but I think it would be keeping on the cards.

Happy to be argued with though

[tomarnoldess]

We discussed this at the meeting on 16th and it was felt that in the short term the best thing to do would be to write a short paragraph saying that the orso initiative has the support of the following facilities... and then we ask them to agree to that and put their logo on the website. The point is that we are not a formal organisation so strictly an MoU is not quite appropriate. What we actually need is visible support from the management of the facilites. @jfkcooper do you think you could write something?

[jfkcooper]

Am happy to do this, will draft a thing and post it here shortly

[jfkcooper]

Thoughts on:

The ORSO initiative is working towards fostering collaboration and unification for reflectivity techniques across neutron and x-ray facilities. Their work towards FAIR data, and true reproducibility represents a paradigm shift in the field. We support the work carried out by ORSO, and our staff helping in this effort:

Facility name and logo

[adrianrennie]

A couple of comments: (a) the discussion mentions facilities but perhaps there will be continuing engagement from others such as academics in universities and even manufacturers of equipment etc. It may be good to leave room for these participants either by indicating that the memorandum of understanding encompasses only one class of co-operation or making it open to others. For example, in universities academic staff may often allocate their own time/effort and the organisation may have no or little responsibility for participation or assignment of staff effort.

(b) The wording above has some slightly strange terms. What is 'unification'? Development and end exploitation of appropriate standards might be better understood. What is 'true reproducibility'? In other fields reproducibility is recognised as important but does not imply identical measured data. Rather the aim is that within known uncertainty, data and analysis would lead to the same conclusions about physical models. Effects of instrumental resolution, for example, lead to different data. I would suggest drawing up a statement that implies listing of overall aims needs to be carefully made to avoid eventual problems or criticism.

(c) It is probably useful to establish which bodies would find a joint statement or a memorandum of understanding useful before devoting too much time to this task. What do various organisations need in the statement?

[tomarnoldess]

Since we have joined the International Scattering Alliance ( https://scatteringalliance.org/ ), this issue is obsolete. Facility support will be inferred by subscriptions to the ISA