March Community Conversation

This meeting was held on Tuesday, March 10, 2026 at 11:30am ET / 10:30am CT / 8:30am PT / 3:30pm GMT. Monthly community meetings are convened over Zoom to discuss topics of interest. Community members are encouraged to bring questions and ideas to share. This month we gave a presentation on our community discovery project and heard from the governance working group.

Quick recap

The ColdFront community meeting focused on two main topics: governance structure and the results of an I-Corps training program. Raminder led a discussion about developing a formal governance model for the project, emphasizing the need to grow the community while maintaining control over contributions and decision-making. Anton shared insights from the I-Corps training, which involved interviewing 100 community members and identifying key challenges facing ColdFront adoption, such as system lock-in and resource constraints. The team discussed potential improvements to ColdFront, including better documentation, ORCID integration, and user experience enhancements. They also explored sustainability options, considering consulting services and potential grant funding from national labs. The conversation ended with an overview of upcoming milestones, including community meetings, conferences, and the development of a developer workshop.

Summary

Meeting Introduction and Greetings

The meeting began with Raminder and Anton greeting participants and allowing time for others to join. No specific decisions, action items, or discussions were mentioned in the provided transcript segment.

ColdFront Governance Structure Discussion

The team discussed governance for ColdFront, with Raminder leading the conversation about developing a formal governance structure. Raminder emphasized keeping it simple and organic, focusing on tracking participation, transparency, meritocracy, and community growth. The group discussed moving from informal to more formal governance to help the project mature and ensure community growth beyond individual contributions. Raminder will organize a focused governance working group meeting to develop a template for community feedback. The meeting also included a brief update about completing I-Corps training for the POSE grant, though the detailed presentation was not shared due to its appropriateness for the audience.

ColdFront Adoption Research Overview

Anton presented a comprehensive overview of the team's research findings from conducting 100 interviews with organizations about ColdFront, an open-source HPC management tool. The team identified 45 active users or explorers, with 19 being hard forkers who have extensively modified the tool. Key adoption challenges included system lock-in, resource constraints, and Django expertise requirements. The team discussed potential solutions including improved documentation, ORCID integration, and storage plugins. They also explored sustainability options, including potential consulting services and grant opportunities from national labs. The presentation concluded with plans for upcoming community meetings, conference presentations, and development of a developer workshop.

Next steps

• Raminder: Reach out to interested participants to schedule and announce the first meeting of the governance working group for focused template development.
• Raminder: Join the architecture group meeting (details provided by Jay) to participate in relevant discussions.
• Raminder: Draft an initial governance template based on today's discussion and feedback, then circulate to the group for review.
• Anton: Collate and share additional findings about community needs and feedback, possibly in next month's meeting or the following.
• (University of British Columbia representative): Present about UBC's ColdFront modifications at an upcoming community meeting (specific date TBD).