SHMS User Group Issues

1. SHMS User Group Issues General Discussion at Hall C User’s Summer Workshop August 5, 2008

2. Excerpt from:Hall C Detector Design and Safety Review6 February 2008 Are individual and group responsibilities clearly identified? • We encourage management to urge the formation of a more formal SHMS collaboration. This should involve the proponents of the primary experiments that will get performed, the magnet design team, the groups who will build the individual subsystems, the experienced people who will integrate these subsystems into a working detector package, and those who will commission and operate the device. • As discussed below, the unusual timing of the planned completion of detector construction at least two years in advance of first operation of the SHMS will pose special challenges that could be met by a more formal SHMS collaboration, rather than the existing model of a user community.

3. STEP 1: Minimalist Approach • Formal membership list • Start with current, informal Hall C User’s list. • General desire for an open membership model, where interested parties can easily get involved. • Minimal bylaws • Official steering committee, laying out procedure and terms of election by Users. • List of responsibilties [largely the same as the present Hall C User Committee]. • Begin work on a more detailed commissioning plan • Draft made by steering committee? Special committee?

4. Possible Benefits • Advantages of a formal membership list • May be useful to show DOE that we are committed to build/commission/use the SHMS. • Potentially makes it easier for new people to get involved as it is easy to know how to join, as opposed to present ill-defined procedure. • Helpful to have an elected Board to oversee issues and represent SHMS Users to Management. • Allison Lung and Rolf Ent have started periodic meetings between representatives of the User community and the12 GeV Project Management reps. Julie Roche presently represents the Hall C Users. • Selection of Board members via an election would help legitimize the Board members in the view of both the Users as well as Management. • More formal organization might by itself be a way to ease the Hall C standing toward DOE.

5. Possibly Contentious Issues • Membership? • Should any JLab User be automatically eligible for membership? • How do people who move on to other things get removed from the list later? • A special set of Commissioning/Collaboration Experiments?? • Not desirable to put off detailed commissioning and optimization until the later high-precision measurements. • Special status for the first few experiments is probably helpful. • The real question is what should happen afterwards. • Still want to encourage experiments from external users, or people who want to run things “their own way”.

6. SHMS Collaboration or User Group? • The name of the entity is less important than the list of important functions identified in the Integration & Safety Review. • How the entity evolves past the SHMS commissioning stage (STEP 2) is perhaps the largest difference between a Collaboration and User Group. • Less beneficial:Review of PAC proposals and publications. • More beneficial: Formal Membership List, Elected Board. • Not clear: Should anymember be eligible to participate in any experiment (as in Hall A)?

7. How do we proceed? • If a more formal structure is what people want, then a committee should be struck to put together a simple set of bylaws and circulate it for input. • John Arrington is willing to be involved, which may be useful given his experience with all three halls, as well as the JLab User Group..