Dear Collaborators, As reported at the EPICS meeting in September 2016 at ORNL, a meeting with representatives from seven EPICS facilities was held to explore the formation of a council to work towards the long-term support of EPICS development efforts. While EPICS has always been successful by the various collaborating organizations developing the new core functions and tools driven by their project needs, we believe investments in major upgrades to EPICS Base and key Extensions would benefit from some longer-term planning and coordinated resource allocation. To that end, we formed an initial EPICS Council to develop a charter which is attached to this message. This charter defines the purpose of the council and includes guidelines for the composition and management of the council. The council will develop a high-level roadmap for EPICS Core and key Extensions and focus on optimizing resources available to work on high priority development efforts as defined in the roadmap. The intent is to focus on development efforts that are broadly applicable within the collaboration rather than those focused on the needs of only a few sites. In order to get started, we are first focusing on the development of EPICS 7 and extensions to CS-Studio. With our charter in mind, the council will be composed of a representative from each organization within the EPICS Collaboration contributing at least 1 FTE towards development work of broad use within the EPICS community. Our next step is to identify facilities who are devoting this level of resource to these development efforts and establish their representation on the council. Representatives should have the budgetary authority within their organization to commit resources to these projects. You may propose a facility and corresponding council representative by sending e-mail with your facility/project, the level of effort or resource you are investing towards development for the broader EPICS community, and the proposed representative to [email protected]. Please use the subject line “EPICS Council”. The nominations will be considered by the initial EPICS Council to ensure alignment with the focus areas and avoid duplication of representation. For reference, the initial council includes representatives from APS, DLS, ESS, ITER, NSLS-II, PSI, SLAC and SNS. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to seeing many of you in Barcelona.
Best regards, Karen (On behalf of the nascent EPICS Council) Karen S. White Controls Group Leader Spallation Neutron Source Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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