3rd July, 2019

Time: 20:00 BST (15:00 EDT).

Joining instructions see above.

Attending: Alistair, Josh, RyanW, Ward, John, Martin

Standing items

Introductions: new joinees should feel welcome to introduce themselves and their interest in zarr/n5.

Items

• Telecon frequency, length, format. (20:04)

  • General agreement on proposal. Revisit time slot, lower

    frequency, potentially shorten. Though may need more time if we’re meeting less frequently.

  • Also need a rotation for sending reminders, etc. Thoughts?

  • Ryan: would say keeping every two weeks is good, even if don’t

    have stuff to report. Once a month in the throes of a spec seems long.

  • Ward: could accommodate either schedule. Do like the momentum.

    Every two week with nothing to report helps to keep the momentum. Can go to less frequent later.

  • Martin: no one wants to take on more organization. Ad hoc

    discussion is important.

  • Josh: could also see more informal meetings (even down to 15

    minutes) and use it to set up longer meetings.

  • Alistair: can see more frequent, but would help massively if

    someone else is sending the reminders. Cf. w3c – 1.5 hours every couple of weeks, and then periodic F2F meetings.

  • Josh: and biweeklies are still reporting and deeper technical

    discussions?

  • Alistair: planning on focusing on the spec and python

    implementation, so would be good to have time to surface design issues.

  • Ward: reasonable.

  • Alistair:

    • doodle after scipy (new connections)
    • skip the 17th, likely to re-start the week after (@John to send)

• CZI call (20:18)

  • Alistair: interest expressed, but concretely …

    • Also starts towards the end of the year

    • Rough roadmap: (1) finish v3 core spec, (2) implemented in active languages (C, Scala, Python, C++, Julia, ~Java (native, re-use scala, wrap C)), (3) fundamental extensions like codecs & storage layers and perhaps protocol extensions, (4) governance (sustainability / transparency / fairness)

    • Someone to work on spec & implementation

    • Cf. new use cases (MET office, sparse arrays, etc)

    • Josh: thinking of very similar steps as Alistair – (0) governance (1) spec (2) prototype (3) supported format – and that works in parallel with the zarr plan.

    • Alistair: happy to host someone

    • Matt (via Alistair): talk to people at scipy about identifying peoples

    • Ryan: wondering via spec v. implementation pitch. Could say both. Personally have some bandwidth to work on implementation. Could potentially host someone at Mount Sinai.

    • John: We could try to get affiliated with NumFOCUS. That’s a bit easier. Alistair and I could try to get this started at SciPy

    • Alistair: looking for ways to accelerate development, failing that we will try to get people together. “Here are the people who are looking to contribute.

    • Ryan: NumFOCUS, 250K (100K for spec; 100K for development work, 50k overhead)

    • Unidata? Ward: have put in several NSF grants (“cloud native data access”, explicitly stating zarr) Attractive.

    • Josh’s three pillars of Zarr excitement:

      • bio domain applications (imaging, single-cell, genomics,

        pangeo, etc.)

      • new functionality / cloud-native features / distributed

        processing

      • integration with existing stable NetCDF standardized

        layer / ecosystem

  • TODOs

    • RyanW: to write to NumFOCUS

    • Alistair/John: to follow up at scipy

    • Alistair to email to all interested parties

    • Josh: will send gdoc for bioimaging

    • [???] governance for NumFOCUS

      • Ward: hdfgroup has governance documents

    • Add to the blog!

• How to break up the spec into a series of discussion topics,
  and what order to take them in. (20:xx)

• Roadmap?

• v3 spec latest draft

• v3 design update

• SciPy / PPTX discussions

  • Alistair: best exemplars? Thinking to give 3.

    • Malaria genomics
    • Single cell (from RyanW, Ambrose as a backup)
    • Pangeo (RyanA)