Meeting Minutes (02 Jun 2011)

• Helpdesk Tickets: We reviewed the helpdesk tickets. Below are tickets that we discussed at some length.
  1. There were a few tickets about confusion with EVLA resources. These often are caused by the user not reading the documentation. We will add a couple of enhancements that will hopefully make these more clear (see below).
  2. There was one ticket complaining that an author should not be able to delete a proposal without the PI's approval. The consensus was that it is very useful for multiple authors to be working on a given proposal and that unless this happens more often we should not make any changes. We were able to provide the user with a backup file. This reminded us of a previous ticket where a user was added to a proposal without their knowledge. Currently all authors are notified when a proposal was submitted but should we notify them sooner?
• Resources
  • Global VLBI (mm wave). EVN/Global (cm wave) have three proposal calls per year and use the NorthStar system. Global VLBI (mm) will shift to two proposal calls per year that are synchronized with NRAO. Currently these proposals are done by email and are added manually to the PST database. Typically there are 5 proposals per cycle. We would like to incorporate these more generally into the PST. Given the short time-line we will put this off until next cycle.
  • EVLA.
    1. Add info to help proposers understand that they get Nx128 MHz aggregate bandwidth, not 1x128 MHz.
    2. In the Session page the current default is an LST range of 0-24 hr. For the EVLA this default implies that the session will be centered at 12h LST which is often incorrect. We need a reminder, either when saving the session or at validation, that the user should check if indeed they want these default values.
  • GBT.
    1. Add new sensitivity calculator link.
    2. Zspectrometer is now a private back-end.
    3. Remove GASP as a back-end.
    4. Add PFGA Spectrometer as a new back-end.
• Misc.
  1. Add a notice during validation that a proposal is eligible for the student observing support (SOS) program.
  2. Include a SOS PI in the SOS page.
  3. New email text for automatic reply.
  4. Enforce that dissertation plans be in pdf format.