This document describes the organization of the BigScience project as a one-year long workshop with a set of collaborative tasks centered in part around the French Jean Zay supercomputing facility. The document describes the committees and answers some specific questions around the roles and access to compute facilities.

Organization - committees

The workshop and collaborative tasks involve:

• A Steering Committee
• An Organization Committee (of the events and collaborative tasks)
• A Program Committee (to be created)
• The participants to the workshop live events and collaborative task

Given the scope of the questions discussed in the workshop as well as the shared task, these committees can be larger and slightly more organized than usual.

Beside the committees detailed below, the workshop currently has as “General Chair”, Thomas Wolf who, together with Stéphane Requena and Pierre-François Lavallée from GENCI and IDRIS, was the early driving force behind the general idea of building an open collaboration inspired by the CERN/LHC. More generally, the project was strongly defined by the set founding members in its early days as detailed above in the Origin section.

Steering committees

The members of the steering committee are informed regularly of the evolution of the workshop and the collaborative tasks.

The steering committee is composed of two sub-committees:

• The Scientific Steering Committee:
  • The steering committee is in charge of advising, proposing directions and members and giving open feedback and non-binding orientation advices on every relevant scientific and organizational aspects of the workshop and collaborative tasks
  • The Scientific Steering Committee is composed of the entirety of the participants to the collaboration which gave birth to this workshop (around 260 people at the time of writing)
  • The diversity and size of the steering committee is a garant of the diversity and related to the wide scope of questions surrounding these artifacts
• The Public Infrastructure Steering Committee:
  • The Public Infrastructure Steering Committee (PISC) is composed of stakeholders around the main public infrastructure used for the collaborative task (at the present time, the Jean Zay supercomputer).
  • This committee is in charge of ensuring that use of public resources within the workshop and collaborative tasks remains aligned with the intended usage and usage rules of the public infrastructure and that the impact of the project on the communities served by the main public infrastructure (the Jean Zay supercomputer at the present time) is beneficial. To support this mission, and in addition to its advisory role, the committee has a right of veto on decisions of the Organization Committee pertaining to how the infrastructures may be used and what data may transit on the infrastructures. This veto requires a 2/3 majority vote by the PISC.
  • If the main public infrastructure used for the collaborative task evolves significantly during the workshop (switching or addition of another supercomputer providing a significant amount of compute hours to the project), the composition of PISC can be updated to reflect this fact.

Organization Committee

The organization committee is comprised of several working groups:

List and updated details here: BigScience - Working Groups

• The addition of new working groups can be proposed by any member of the SC
• Members of the workshop can ask to join any working group as long as they can commit some time and have interest/some expertise in the associated working group
• Each working group will have at least one chair in charge of making sure the work is moving forward and coordinating/moderating the discussion if necessary