Minutes of SunPy Board Meeting 20140505

Date of Meeting

5th May 2014

Agenda

• SEP-0004 Quantities (ready for vote?)

• Discussion on SEP-0003 Light curve factory

• Need for other SEPs (e.g. meta refactor)

• Discussion on voting by proxy (Considerations include establishing quorum, verification of proxy status, dispute resolution, etc.)

• SOCIS 2014

• Lead Developer Report

  • sub-domains (hosting)
  • PR acceptance
  • GSOC 2014

Attendance

Present: Steven Christe (Chair), David Perez-Suarez (Vice-Chair), Andrew Inglis (Secretary), Albert Shih, Stuart Mumford, Jack Ireland, Tom Robitaille, Juan Carloz Martinez Oliveros

Absent: Russell Hewett

Meeting notes

• Discussion of SEP-0004, regarding the use of AstroPy Quantities.

• The SEP states that classes and functions involving physical units must accept only Quantities. If a Quantity is not given, the function will give an error. Exceptions are allowed in cases where Quantities adversely affect performance, or where Quantities are incompatible with other dependencies (e.g. Scipy).

• Questions as to how Quantities would relate to time data, e.g. how is parse_time or TimeRange affected by this. Consensus that there is no strong reason to change the time functionality, since it is already unit aware through datetime.

• Decision needed on how to document the exceptions where Quantities are not used. Otherwise it may be forgotten whether the omission of Quantities was intentional.

• How does Quantities deal with variables such as DN in AIA images, which are not real physical quantities/units? Likely that these would not be Quantities.

• Consensus to drop the requirement to return output quantities as SI units in SEP-0004

• Discussion of SEP-0003, regarding the Lightcurve Factory postponed until a future meeting.

• The issue of proxy voting is raised. Currently no procedure for this within SunPy.

  • As SunPy becomes more international, this will become a more important issue, as Board members will inevitably be absent.
  • One possibility would be to arrange offline votes. The system would involve specifying a specific time window (e.g. 1 day) for Board members to cast their vote (e.g. by email, doodle poll).

• Vote is held on whether to allow proxy voting. Result is 7-0 against allowing proxies, with 1 abstention.

• Vote is held on whether voting by email/remote means should be allowed in exceptional cases. 'Exceptional circumstances' would have to be agreed at a prior Board meeting. Result is 7-0 in favour, with 1 abstention.

Albert Shih departed the meeting.

Juan Carlos Martinez Oliveros departed the meeting

Other business

• SunPy was accepted for ESA Summer of Code in Space for 2014

• Work is ongoing to transfer full control of Sunpy.org to the SunPy organization - Dr Alex Young, NASA/GSFC is the current owner for historical reasons.

• Hosting of SunPy demo data: Stuart Mumford has a current subscription to www.servage.net that may be used for this purpose.

• GSOC students in the introductory phase. Have 4 students this year.

• Next meeting is provisionally scheduled for 9th June 2014 at 17:00 GMT.

Meeting ends.