it was: "Time for another European ROMS workshop?"

[carniel]

Dear all,

I have been contacted direclty via e-mail by some of you regarding the Subject "Time for another European ROMS workshop"; you correclty brought up to my attention that this subject was originally posted under "ROMS workshop", and in there the reply is not possible except for moderators.
I am therefore copying the same lines in here now.
Cheers

Sandro
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Dear all,

After several years from the last one, I feel the need to set up another "European" ROMS workshops. I think times are ripe for another meeting, and I wish to share with all of you the idea to think about its organization, if possible and not conflicting with other initiatives, of course.

I would therefore appreciate to open a short discussion on this side on the Forum, also in the perspective of these more specific points:

a) ROMS has been widely used and adopted in several European countries in the last years. Including several EU funded Projects. The situation has changed quite a bit since the early and pioneering workshop of 2004!
b) without necessarily driving this into Venice, me and other colleagues within CNR-ISMAR are available to carry out a significant part of the load in the organization.
c) We may also think about starting the good habit to publish (selected) contributions from the Workshop in a Special Issue of an international journal (albeit with no or low impact factor). I have already established contacts in this directions.

This would surely increase the interest in the participation, as well as the budget justification.

All the best,

Sandro

[julian.kuhlmann]

I think it's a great idea and I'd definitely want to participate. If nobody from America could make it to the workshop, it should work with Europeans only, too. Especially for European PhD students, it's always hard to justify a journey to a workshop in Brazil or Honolulu in front of their supervisors. Venice would certainly see more participation from this side!

[arango]

Organizing ROMS workshops takes time and resources and we prefer to have just one general user Workshop per year. Although, in 2010 we have also a 4D-Var workshop, which took Andy and I couple of months to prepare. We have been talking about the next European Workshop for awhile. We are thinking that it can be held either in Germany, Ireland, England, or Norway (due to the number of ROMS users). Our policy is to visit different countries each time to give the opportunity to the user communities in the host country to attend, meet, and share their research and ROMS experiences. So far we have visited Italy, Spain, and France. Perhaps, we should have next year workshop in Europe...

We don't see any problems with European users organizing internal meetings to share their ROMS results. However, the ROMS workshops are special because nowadays we offer tutorials on advanced algorithms, report on new developments and future plans. We have had good feedback from new/recent/student users on the tutorials and additional information. This requires the attendance of ROMS developers and most of them reside in the US. We also encourage those ROMS developers who reside outside the US to attend the workshops regardless of the location.

The ROMS workshops are more relaxed than the usual annual scientific meeting in the US or Europe. There is more time allocated to discuss results and algorithms. You may have notice that in this annual meeting there are a lot of modeling talks related to ROMS. Attendees just need to check and navigate the meeting programs in detail. It will be nice if in the future we can list such talks on this website, but this requires the full collaboration from the meeting attendees.

[nello]

I support the idea to hold the next ROMS Workshop in Europe, and it is fair to search for a Nation not still visited.
Hoping that someone from such contries (also Croatia would be an interesting place) will offer (the support offered by Sandro could be very helpful).

[Ilaria]

Dear all,
indeed, it has been a while ago from the last European workshop...and Julian is right, traveling oversea has become prohibitive in these days for many young scientists (that are, however, the future reservoir of ROMS).
It would be great to put together another effort
Obviously our interest is to exchange ideas and results with the whole ROMS community and above all with the US developers but, at the same time, we were discussing about the chance to organize such an internal meeting among the Italian users in 2012.
It could be slightly enlarged, made more official and open to the rest of the European community; the organization is not trivial, but at the same time it could be shared among the proponents.
Cheers
Ilaria

[arango]

We are trying to have a balanced approach when organizing the ROMS Workshops. ROMS nowadays has thousands of users worldwide and obviously we cannot satisfy everybody. This year we are having the first ROMS Workshop in South America. The user community there has been waiting patiently for years. We realize that a big part of the ROMS user community are graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and it is difficult to travel overseas because visa requirements and scarce traveling budgets. These were the major reasons why we decided to travel the ROMS Workshop abroad to give the opportunity to users nearby to attend. We try not to offend the sensitivity of our user community by favoring a particular city/country over other. After all, there are great places in the work to visit. Therefore, we have several analytical guidelines (in order of importance) when selecting a city/country for the ROMS Workshop:

• An active and mature ROMS user community to increase the level of interactions between modeling scientists within the host country and visiting users. We have great success with the modeling communities in the host country. In particular, the outreach when we visited Italy, Spain, France, Australia, and Hawaii was great. Amazingly, the scientific quality of the ROMS Workshop is getting better and better. We were surprised by the level of interactions when the ROMS Workshop was held Spain. Several lasting collaborations between the attendees were established and the user community in Spain has grown substantially since them. We have a very vibrant and active community in France. This is primarily due to the ROMS-Agrid group. The Workshop in Australia was great and everybody was there. The Workshop in Venice is in a very special place in our hearts since it was the first Workshop abroad.
• We usually select cities that you can travel directly from anywhere in the world. So we need international airports nearby, great public transportation, and easy VISA requirements. The exception to the rule is the US, but this is out of our control. However, I not aware of a user traveling to the US that have any VISA problems.
• We need a local contact the help us with the logistics. Ideally, we prefer to held the workshop at Universities, so the use of the conference room is free or at a reasonable fee.
• We usually write proposals to help us to finance the workshop so the registration fee is at minimum. Therefore, additional funds are welcome. Every time that we travel abroad, US users and developers pay their expenses from their own grants.
• We need to have decent hotels at a reasonable price. You cannot imagine the time that we spend inquiring about these hotels to make sure that what we see in picture is actually the real thing and not artifacts (angles) of photography.
• We select places that are attractive to visit, so we can program extra-curricular touristic activities, dinners, and other fun stuff. Some users like to bring family member(s), so having a nice place to visit is a plus.

Each Workshop take us up two months to organize. We only have the means and time to plan for just one annual Workshop. Our own work is squeezed to accommodate the time that we spend organizing these Workshops. Nowadays, is getting worse since Andy and I started offering a week-long ROMS 4D-Var data assimilation tutorials.

The issue about publications about the ROMS Workshop has come up several times. We have discussed this at length and came to the conclusion that it is not a good idea. It consumes a lot of time and many of the users have the own preferences and timing to publish their own research.

We always put all the ROMS workshop presentations in this website. We have try to record important presentations with various levels of success. This require professionals and we do not have the fund for this type of activities.

[julian.kuhlmann]

Sure, the goal would not be to replace the planned ROMS workshops or to move them over to Europe. But maybe we could just have an informal meeting of European users to discuss applications, problems, and some results. Just a couple of days at a European university or institute, more talks and discussion than lectures and practicals, simple organization, low key.

If publication of the results doesn't work out, at least those who feel like it could upload the slides and posters somewhere so everybody can benefit from them.

Ilaria, if your planned Italian meeting could be made open for everybody and held in English, that sounds like a great start!

[carniel]

Julian,
that's exactly the spirit I had in mind! No need for tutorials, a couple of days, a sort of meeting close to those that are typically organized during EU funded project.
The local host provides as much support as possible.
With my group we have been organizing a couple of these events every year, in the last 3 years; the efforts are acceptable.
If there is enough interest form other European users, we may start thinking about this solution,
making clear it is not an official ROMS workshop.
Any other thoughts?

Sandro