Standing Committee Meeting Report Education and Public Outreach

September 2016

Action Items  - EPO Standing Committee Meeting

September 22, 2016 - September 23, 2016

IRIS HQ, Washington, DC

• Coordinate NAGT-GER webinar that would be of interest to the broad IRIS community
• Poll past faculty mentors & summer interns as to whether they would prefer a separate REU/IRIS poster session at AGU, rather than the current integrated approach.  Then depending on result of poll - talk with section presidents/program committee, and potentially submit session proposal for AGU
• Create proposed plan for communication workshop as add on to another meeting
• Blogs & Tweets from the field - send short field videos and text for posting by Wendy Bohon
• Create a plan for expanding reach of IRIS EPO resources
• Put Derek Schutt’s seismology course online
• Survey the community to determine the interest in a few polished vs. a larger number of raw/unvetted resources
• Determine if closed captioning is required for videos that are part of courses at UAF
• Revisit the goals/objectives from the ECI summary/document from the NGEO proposal and develop a set of specific objectives for a joint IRIS/UNAVCO program
• Determine if an ECI needs assessment has been completed within the past few years.  If not, conduct a survey.
• Contact Earth Science Women’s Network about their support group structure 

Meeting Summary

The EPO Standing Committee met on September 22-23, 2016 at IRIS headquarters. The attendees for part or all of the meeting included: Derek Schutt, Lora Bleacher, Donna Charlevoix, Maureen Long, John Louie, Meghan Miller, Fred Schroeder, Stefany Sit, Wendy Bohon, Bob Detrick, Perle Dorr, Mladen Dordevic, Natalie Edgecombe, Danielle Sumy, and John Taber.  Remote attendees included: Maite Agopian, Mariela Bao, Tammy Bravo, Anna Courtier, Michael Hubenthal, and Mike West.

The meeting began with a review of the minutes and action items from the previous meeting, followed by a presentation and discussion on EPO program highlights over the past six months.  A discussion followed regarding the status and plans for EPO program evaluation, with a focus on how to best collect and present the data and results to provide useful information to the EPO program, the EPO Standing Committee and NSF.    Then the NGEO proposal was discussed, including the planned collaborations the UNAVCO ECE program.  This was followed by a presentation on other UNAVCO ECE activities of interest to IRIS EPO, as well as EarthScope National Office activities.

There was then a discussion of the activities being planned under the new INCLUDES award, that is led by Carleton College, with IRIS and UNAVCO as two of the collaborators.  This was followed by a presentation and discussion on social media and communications training.  Recent Early Career Investigator activities were discussed, followed by a consideration of potential future activities.  This led to a discussion of the challenges of faculty and researchers at non-R1 institutions, and what IRIS could do to assist them.

The dissemination of resources via the InClass web portal was discussed, with a consideration of how to expand the reach of the materials and what additional materials might be added. The status of the online seismology course for teachers was presented, which is being developed in collaboration with University of Alaska, followed by a presentation on the Quake Catcher Network, and the status of collaborations with SCEC.

The 2nd day began with an executive session, and then a continued discussion of future ECI activities.   Future program-wide priorities were then examined, along with the status of goals stated in the NSF SAGE proposal.  The meeting concluded with the creation of a prioritized list of potential new committee members.