February 17 and 23, 2017
Virtual meeting
For the Spring 2017 meeting, the EPO Standing Committee met virtually in two 3-hour sessions, on 2/17/17 and 2/23/17. The attendees for part or all of the meetings included: John N. Louie - Chair, Maite Agopian, Mariela Bao, Lora Bleacher, Anna Courtier, Vince Cronin, Stefany Sit, Mike Thorne, Bob Wegner, Zhigang Peng, Tammy Bravo, Bob Detrick, Mladen Dordevic, Perle Dorr, Michael Hubenthal, Danielle Sumy, and John Taber.
The meeting began with a review of the minutes and action items from the previous meeting, followed by a review of the Board guidance to committees. Then there was a presentation and discussion on EPO program highlights over the past six months. This was followed by a discussion of the program priorities for the next 6 months. Then an update on the NGEO proposal was discussed, including planned collaborations the UNAVCO ECE program. This was followed by a presentation on EarthScope National Office E&O activities.
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 status was discussed of the new online professional development course on earthquakes and seismology being offered for teachers in collaboration with University of Alaska Fairbanks. The first call finished with a discussion of the potential involvement of IRIS EPO in the proposed Canadian Cordilleran Array project.
The 2nd day began with an executive session, and then a discussion about how to increase the visibility both of EPO products and of community science results that use IRIS equipment and data. The opportunity to provide more IRIS products for textbook publishers was discussed as one possible avenue to pursue. There were then additional discussions about how to best present evaluation metrics, and how to best demonstrate ongoing collaboration with UNAVCO ECE.
The draft EPO FY18 budget was then presented and discussed, and was approved after minor modifications. Uses of FY16 carryover funds were also approved. There were then discussions about potential citizen science projects and the creation of new interactive web applications to replace the retired Rapid Earthquake Viewer. The meeting concluded with a discussion of the effectiveness of virtual meetings.
