HSF Steering Group Meeting, 27 February 2026
- Attending
- News
- Status of the Activity Areas and Conveners for 2026
- WLCG Management Board community software liaison
- Advisory Group Follow-ups
- HSF Budget
- Programme of Project/Software Affiliation - Ongoing reviews
- HSF GitHub matters
- SG Composition
- HSF representation
- AOB
Attending
Present/Contributing: Eduardo Rodrigues, Graeme Stewart, Paul Laycock, Johannes Elmsheuser, Stefan Roiser, Caterina Doglioni, Pere Mato, Mark Neubauer, Michel Villanueva, Liz Sexton-Kennedy
Apologies: Claire Antel
News
SHiP collaboration interested in the HSF, in particular in the training materials/activities - they already have a Rust implementation of the “HSF conditions DB”, for example. ACTION: Eduardo got in touch and suggested a little “Hello world” presentation to them. TBC for the SHiP Collaboration week in the 2nd half of March.
Joint WLCG/HSF workshop 2026
- Confirmed for November 2-6 in Bologna.
- For now, Eduardo and Stefan are on the organisation from the HSF side. Johannes has both hats :).
- Anyone interested to help? Then we should be covered.
- Liz and Michel volunteer to help.
- It is important to identify topics for the workshop. Please share your suggestions asap.
- First organisation meeting in early March.
Status of the Activity Areas and Conveners for 2026
- Should SG liaison role assignments be revisited? Should liaisons be encouraged to get in touch with the activity areas soon?
- Current list of roles and assignments.
- is this up to date?
WLCG Management Board community software liaison
Preparation of the workshop and the RRB report for April.
Advisory Group Follow-ups
- Some admin matters not delved into here (update of AG members list, WIP election of an AG chair).
- We are discussing the idea of having another meeting in 2026 to keep momentun.
- HSF seminars seen positively as an effective approach for dissemination of information.
- Proposal to enhance representation of communities/experiments in the SG (ALICE and MCnet are for example not represented). Eduardo to reach out to AG liaisons. (Note MCNet would help with closing the long-standing question on the Physics Generators activity.)
- It was agreed to invite ePIC/EIC to the AG. Eduardo has sent an invitation out.
- Affiliation programme: documentation needs updating if the process is streamlined; need to discuss the idea of re-validating affiliations after a certain number of years, hence formalise a procedure for periodic review.
- AG to provide a somewhat prioritised list of projects to approach for affiliation.
HSF Budget
Nothing to report - healthy status - except that the stipend for GSoC 2025 has reached the CERN account.
Programme of Project/Software Affiliation
-
We have proposed to work with the experiments to compile a list of the software packages that are used. Who wants to make this happen?
-
Discussion following exchange between Liz/Caterina/Paul
- Liz: I thought that we had removed the distinction between the different badge colours (gold, silver, bronze). Introducing tiers is just bringing it back. I remember these reasons for not having them, 1. some in our community thought that it would exclude them from a level they thought they deserved. 2. some of the adoption and sustainability criteria don’t work in our field. Even long running projects like IRIS-HEP don’t last indefinitely. The only projects I know of that do are at labs like CERN and Fermilab.
- Paul: Concrete proposal: HSF project affiliation means the project follows the best practice guidelines. Remove the section on Differential best practices, potentially add a reference to the EVERSE RSQKit page (is it final?). Discuss EVERSE RSQKit at the WLCG/HSF workshop in November. Charge the AG (the next meeting should be close to that workshop) to provide guidance on how affiliation rules should change.
- Caterina: keep the Tiers for guidance because they aren’t badges but rather present the level of maturity of the software when they come in. However, soften certain requirements (e.g. number of “permanent” developers, tutorials for Rucio) or keep them as suggestion rather than blocker - maybe this merges with Paul’s proposal of removing differential judgement.
- Follow up discussion on specific Pythia case (or: why it’s important HSF does these reviews, going towards a potential automation future)
- Q: can we make the reports public after discussing with the authors?
Ongoing reviews
- DIRAC
- MadGraph5_aMC@NLO
- NoPayloadDB Conditions Database
- Pepper
- Pythia [discussed with authors, authors happy]
ACTION for all: discuss affiliation with relevant project authors.
HSF GitHub matters
We should be making better use of GitHub Teams, which have been dormant in most cases.
- Team for the SG is https://github.com/orgs/HSF/teams/steering-group. ACTION: update it to reflect the SG composition.
- Team for management of the website is https://github.com/orgs/HSF/teams/website-managers. ACTION: review the list and have at least 6 people from the SG so that the work load is shared - reviews for general website updates can then go to several people. Kindly let Eduardo know if you would be happy to be in this team - it’s not a big load and you won’t need to react on every single PR.
- Suggestion to delete the following teams, now redundant or superseded:
SG Composition
- Sad news that Torre Wenaus stepped down as he retired. A big thank you to him for all he has done for the HSF for many years!
- We should review annually the composition. Reminder that our SG webpage states that “When a SG member becomes inactive (e.g., ceases to meaningfully follow any HSF activities) in the HSF they will leave the SG.”.
- If you know of someone who is active in community work and shares the HSF’s goals consider inviting them to be on the SG.
HSF representation
- We are regularly asked to present or attend events.
- See list of presentations at https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/organization/presentations.html.
ACTION: please check if the talks you gave for the HSF are listed at the above link.
AOB
Next Meeting
In about a month.