Minutes of CALICE-UK Steering Board phone meeting, 23/08/02 =========================================================== Present: Jon Butterworth, Paul Dauncey, David Miller, Mark Thomson, David Ward o) Schedule for PPRP submission; The pros and cons of submitting to the next but one PPRP meeting on December 2, as opposed to the next which is on September 30, were discussed: Pros: o) The Manchester lectureship will be decided by Dec and may be a person working mostly on CALICE. o) We will have done more work and so there will be more to write about. o) The very tight rules on conflict of interest (requiring PPRP members at the same institute as the proposers to leave) may be relaxed by the Dec meeting. o) We would not be appearing desparate in returning immediately and we would have more time to prepare the submission. Cons: o) We only have 4k of travel money to last us until we are approved. o) We will not have RAL TD effort until we are approved. o) It may be morale is low until we are approved. o) The Manchester lectureship may not go to CALICE. The discussion following decided that the Manchester lectureship would not count for us if we submitted in Sept as it would be ignored by the PPRP if not definite. Hence, it not going to CALICE would not be worse than the situation now, so we would only potentially gain in this in Dec. More work would demonstrate we were capable of doing the job with the effort we have and may should some of the simulation tasks are not as fierce as the referee thought. However, the work rate would be likely to slow down when term starts, at least for the academics (DavidW and Nigel). As 1/3 of the PPRP were changing over before the Sept meeting and the replacements are not yet announced, then the impact of the conflict of interest rule changes was hard to evaluate. We have spent ~1k of the 4k travel money so far in this FY, i.e. in around four months. UK travel alone would probably not use up the rest in the four months to Dec. However, there is a CALICE meetin at CERN on Sept 24/25 and it would be very beneficial to send at least two if not three people, which might be ~1.5k. It was not thought too unlikely we could get a little extra from Ken Peach later in the year if we go for a Dec submission. There is also an EFCA/DESY LC meeting in Prague in Nov but in principle we should not use experiment travel funds for workshops. Mark and DavidM will go on other travel budgets anyway. The electronics work is progressing well, but without the RAL TD effort it is clearly going slower than we scheduled for. Paul estimates a 2-3 month slip overall if we don't get RAL TD manpower until Dec. The original schedule had it finished in Jan 2004 but as this end date is so uncertain, the slip was not seen as a serious issue at this point. Also, the original schedule called for equipment money only in Jan 2004 so there is no problem with submitting in Dec from that point of view. Mark asked what CALICE as a whole would think of us delaying until Dec, as being turned down then gives them three months less to sort out an alternative. DavidM and Paul will check with Rolf next week (at the LC meeting in Korea; also not off our travel budget!). DavidM asked how our proposal compares with the PPRP budget. Paul has incorporated a few small corrections to the tables and the new version is now at: http://www.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/~dauncey/lc/calice2.ps (Please let him know of any further corrections which are needed.) The PPRP cost now includes not only equipment, but also RAL TD effort, travel and new posts (i.e. the RA). The PPRP annual budget has been doubled to 600k to compensate for this increase. The second table shows our estimates of PPRP cost are now 99k, 249k and 81k for the three years so we are a significant fraction, particularly in FY03/04, but not obviously too far out of line. One point to note in the first table is that every institute (except Manchester) now has some academic working 50% or more on CALICE, which is a strong point we should make (and if Manchester get a CALICE lecturer...). Overall, the feeling was that a delay until Dec makes sense and we should plan on that. Roger is thought to agree with this but Chris, Nigel and Ian should feel free to make any other points they think are relevant. Paul will write a short formal letter to the PPRP stating our intentions so they don't think we just missed the Sept deadline through disorganisation. The letter should emphasise that, having taken the time to consider the PPRP's issues, we must have a final decision at the Dec meeting. o) Content of PPRP submission; Several ideas of what to submit had been circulated, from two pages (from Neville Harnew) to a full rewrite of the original proposal. It was thought best to not submit a full proposal as the panel would not want to read through ~20 pages looking for the changes. The conclusion was that we should aim for around five pages of text, plus figures and the appendix of updates tables. The five pages should be roughly divided as: o) One page for an introduction, arguing our case as strategically important in the long term but not so much until ~2005, etc. o) Three pages for the status of the simulation work, including plots showing the progress of the G3/G4/Fluka work, work packages and schedule, and describing how the new UCL effort fits in (emphasising the commonality so as to make it seem like not too much of an extra task). o) One page for the status of the electronics, which should have had at least one of the ISO9001 reviews by that time, hopefully with a positive outcome. o) Location of new RA post: In the absence of representatives of all the groups, it was not thought fair to make a decision on this topic. However, the criterion for deciding was discussed. The feeling was that the RA should go wherever it would make most impact and work most effectively for us as a whole. This effectively means a group which has a strong simulation effort already (which coincides with what the PPRP minutes suggested also). It should not be allocated to try to beef up a weak group. Paul stated that he thought IC should not be considered for this post as there is no simulation effort there now. Of the other groups, on this criterion, Manchester are probably excluded if their lectureship does not come to CALICE (but would have a good case otherwise). The other three groups all expressed an interest in having the post at their institute. As we are aiming for a Dec submission, this does not have to be decided soon and should certainly not be fixed until after the Manchester outcome is known.