Fulker briefly recapitulated Unidata's history, acknowledging that an extension of Unidata's efforts to help universities with K-12 outreach would be a change in the program's mission. He pointed out that Unidata's success to date rests on its having the community's blessings for its activities, and the community would thus need to bless this alteration. At the same time, however, the Program needs to be prepared for what appears to be a tidal wave of requests for support in K-12 support, as more Unidata sites do engage in outreach efforts. Fulker strongly recommended that this preparation be in the form of extending Unidata's roles of support to universities to include support for university outreach. He emphasized that this did not mean providing any support to K-12 institutions directly.

Discussion

• World now is very different than in 1982: there has been a change in administrations, growth of the Internet, and the crisis in education (both K-12 and at the university level) is on the national agenda. Unidata is at the cutting edge of the Gore initiatives in computing and education.
• Other organizations are pursuing other avenues: AMS Project Atmosphere, for example, is feeding selected alpha numeric data over the vertical blanking area of the Weather Channel (about half the schools in the US have access to this channel). On the school end, this requires a decoder and a computer.
• The Campus Weather Display software proves that delivering data to any classroom is feasible; the problem in K-12 environment is classroom materials to implement curriculum and use data. In any K-12 class, meteorology is likely to be only a small part of the science curriculum: is this really a job for Unidata sites?
• The greatest concerns expressed were the potential dilution of Unidata resources in terms of both money and human effort and whether any effort in the education outreach arena can be contained and controlled. Insisting that Unidata efforts be limited to working with universities and then only if new monies were identified were deemed the most effective way of ensuring containment. And there was concern expressed that success hinged on ensuring that universities themselves understood these constraints on Unidata.
• There was concern expressed that Unidata staff time would be sapped in preparing joint proposals with universities. At the same time, this may be the only way to demonstrate to NSF/EHR the value of funding infrastructure development.
• Over the longer term, Unidata involvement in educational efforts will probably reflect well on NSF. Perhaps an effort should be made to educate departments outside of ATM through a combined Unidata/Michigan/Illinois demonstration at headquarters.
• There was agreement that a program such as Blue Skies had the potential of becoming a valuable national program by creating novel partnerships between universities and school districts. Clearly, the Unidata contribution to the infrastructure would be a tiny but vital portion of the effort with the bulk of work being done by the K-12 educators themselves. These are the only people capable of created the curriculum to use the software/data infrastructure.
• Conceivably, Unidata could play a second contributory role in the form of identifying and incorporating new data sources.

Resolution 2:
The Unidata Program Center is encouraged to engage in joint proposals and endeavors with U.S. universities and other geoscience consortia to enhance math and science education across a broad range of grade levels and disciplines through uses of geoscientific data and applicable technologies IF:

• New funds are identified for all new work performed by the Unidata Program Center.
• The universities take responsibility for all K-12 and other non-university contacts, including teacher training and support, as well as for the overall educational success of the endeavor.
• Unidata responsibilities are limited to managing data flows among universities and to providing software and associated technical support to university personnel.

NIDS

Discussion

• The IDD will involve a dual procurement: FOS (which involve buying a service) and NIDS (which involved buying a product).
• The UPC has a commitment from NWS to make NIDS data available to universities.
• Fulker estimates that final negotiations on NIDS should occur in February or March; UPC wants data available by next summer.
• What the vendors will supply are data products, not raw data; products include map backgrounds; they are like FAX maps.
• There was considerable concern that the NIDS products being considered would be of little use to the community. On the one hand, NIDS products may satisfy synoptic needs; on the other, radar meteorologists may find them useless. There seemed to be a general consensus that if certain members of the community want full resolution digital NEXRAD data prior to its conversion into NIDS products, then these universities should procure these data directly from NOAA or from another vendor.
• There was discussion as to whether a national mosaic should be mandatory in the RFP; the consensus was to let the mosaic remain optional since FSL plans to create a mosaic anyway and leaving it optional in the RFP will allow a large number of vendors to respond.

Action 1:
Fulker will explore how NIDS products might be used by the community.

Resolution 3:
The Policy Committee recommends that the UPC continue with its current draft of the Request for Proposal concerning the NIDS data.

Action 2:
The UPC will distributed the RFP to members of the Policy Committee and to Ramamurthy as soon as practical.

Report on the First Regional Unidata Workshop

Research Floater

Discussion

• Members questioned whether Principal Investigators could include monies for research support if the floater was needed; there seemed to be agreement that this was a possibility.

Lightning Data

Action 3:
Fulker will continue discussions with SUNY-Albany concerning the GeoMet data and will attempt to negotiate an agreement whereby universities may subscribe to the data individually.

Current Mix of Unidata-Supported Platforms

Discussion

• The UPC is strongly adverse to reducing the number of platforms. McIDAS sites are still buying OS/2 machines; dropping support would simply create an enormous support burden.
• NSF expressed discomfort with the idea of supporting a single vendor.
• To maintain future flexibility, UPC staff need to maintain familiarity with more than a single platform.
• A number of campuses have DECs and will want to move to OSF-1, an unsupported platform. Since UPC has de facto support for DEC Alphas and SGIs, supporting OSF-1 will be sensible in the long run. Therefore, cutting operating system support isn't likely either.
• If cost cutting in the form of decreased support becomes necessary, the Policy Committee will rely heavily on input from the Users Committee to recommend where these cuts occur.
• Mandating that sites keep their operating systems current might ease some support problems

Action: 4
Add a column to the supported platforms table in the newsletter that lists the sunset date for software versions.

Statement of Principal:
The Unidata Policy Committee believes in principal that supporting a single platform or a single operating system is not a feasible option for the Unidata Program.

Action: 5
The UPC staff will continue to explore mechanisms for keeping current on software and hardware while shedding older versions of both.

YNOT Test Period

Recommendation 1:
In light of the statements by the evaluators that they needed the Spring semester to get students to use YNOT, the ATAC recommends that the Policy Committee delay its decision on YNOT by at least one Policy Committee meeting. If resource constraints are a major consideration, the Policy Committee could allow the test to continue while recommending that no additional UPC development effort be applied beyond February 1994.

Discussion

• The committee weighed the question of how much resource YNOT currently consumes (1 FTE) against the need for more staff resources for IDD development. The committee also debated how YNOT resources would be best used: creating templates? bug fixes? The Naval Postgraduate School sees considerable possibility in the software, but other members questioned whether Unidata should create a constituency for a product that the committee finds questionable.
• The 1994 Users Workshop might be a good forum for arriving on a final decision on YNOT. If there is interest in the package, community support might be possible.

Resolution 4:
The Unidata Policy Committee agrees to extend the test of YNOT to the end of the spring academic term.

Resolution 5:
The Unidata Policy Committee recommends the UPC expend up to 1 FTE (full-time equivalent) on support of YNOT until December 1 1993 and recommends the UPC expend up to 0.2 FTE from December until the Policy Committee meetings in July 1994.

Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS)

The IRIS program shares some characteristics with Unidata: the goal of enabling institutions to easily access data; the provision near-real-time data to users; the need to serve a dispersed community. There was general agreement that the two programs could learn from one another and share solutions to common problems and possibly even share data.

List of Resolutions and Status of Action Items

Resolution 1:
The Policy Committee recommends that Unidata data distribution, software distribution, and user support be performed entirely via Internet as of 1 September 1995. Unidata therefore will require that sites requesting Unidata support and data delivery establish TCP/IP access to the Internet no later than 1 September 1995. Unidata can provide limited technical and other assistance to help sites connect to the Internet.

Resolution 2:
The Unidata Program Center is encouraged to engage in joint proposals and endeavors with U.S. universities and other geoscience consortia to enhance math and science education across a broad range of grade levels and disciplines through uses of geoscientific data and applicable technologies IF:

• New funds are identified for all new work performed by the Unidata Program Center.
• The universities take responsibility for all K-12 and other non-university contacts, including teacher training and support, as well as for the overall educational success of the endeavor.
• Unidata responsibilities are limited to managing data flows among universities and to providing software and associated technical support to university personnel.

Resolution 3:
The Policy Committee recommends that the UPC continue with its current draft of the Request for Proposal concerning the NIDS data.

Resolution 4:
The Unidata Policy Committee agrees to extend the test of YNOT to the end of the spring academic term.

Resolution 5:
The Unidata Policy Committee recommends the UPC expend up to 1 FTE (full-time equivalent) on support of YNOT until December 1 1993 and recommends that the UPC expend up to 0.2 FTE from December until the Policy Committee meetings in July 1994.

Action 1:
Fulker will explore how NIDS products might be used by the community.

Ongoing.

Action 2:
The UPC will distributed the RFP to members of the Policy Committee and to Ramamurthy as soon as practical.

Done.

Action 3:
Fulker will continue discussions with SUNY-Albany concerning the GeoMet data and will attempt to negotiate an agreement whereby universities may subscribe to the data individually.

Topic on agenda.

Action 4:
Add a column to the supported platforms table in the newsletter that lists the sunset date for software versions.

In progress.

Action 5:
The UPC staff will continue to explore mechanisms for keeping current on software and hardware while shedding older versions of both.

Ongoing.