2023_09_15 Polymer grant discussion

Early one-pager https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HS0dDlwW2LF7Cadic3Rc8t8c5GS-llcWj4KJoBmgWeg/edit

JW –

• My ideal situation would be:

  • OpenFF devs paid for time

  • Software/workflows created live in a different org that we aren’t responsible for maintaining or where expectations are explicit

• My worst-case scenario would be

  • OpenFF devs responsible for delivering things that aren’t specced when we agree to deliver them

  • Unclear expectations of maintenance

    • MS – Zero expectation of maintenance after paid time.

  • I spend several months hiring+onboarding+training a new person and then I have to fire them at the end

• MS – To reduce the number of hats that JW wears, this could be planned as something that spins into its own OMSF project. So JW could be OMSF PI for the grant and the role would be to help the new person become the technical lead for the new project.

• JW – $100k split between my training time and their salary can’t hire a technical lead.

• MS – Maybe possible to push higher.

• JW – We’re going to be pretty much at capacity next year on the infrastructure team. So we’d need to make sure there’s a person to fill this role.

• MS + DM – There’s a lot in flux funding-wise, so there may be fractions of a person elsewhere in OMSF who can be assigned to this.

• JW – My major caution as potential PI is that I personally will jump in and spend my time to get stuff done if things go wrong with the new hire, which I can’t really support as OpenFF tech lead.

• MS – Some question of what OMSF wants to be. Other projects have had some pre-existing stuff when they came in, whereas this is nucleating a new one.

• JW – If we got enough for 80% of a person, who would be in charge of hiring? I’m happy to do onboarding and training.

  • MS – Other PIs would be in charge of hiring, with JW looped into later stage interviews.

• JW – What would my role be?

  • MS – Kinda in flux, but PI on a subcontract from colorado…. For software devs the grant wants us to specify how they’ll be trained in software development, and OMSF seems like a great place to do software training. So your role would be to fulfill the goal of training that person as a scientific programmer, not as project management. And if there’s additional time they could work directly on OpenFF.

  • JW – That sounds good to me. DM, what’s a reasonable time range for me to put toward this effort? 10%?

  • DM – The bigger thing would be planning ahead for your absence so that we don’t derail. But 10% is reasonable.

  • MS – Broader question about OMSF offering software training? Can POSE money help with this/is this written in the goals?

  • JW – I’d really enjoy training/mentoring but we have a discrtization problem with our current development team - Hard to have continuity of people when money keeps coming from different sources. Could be cool to have a larger OMSF training effort, possibly even joined with MolSSI training

  • DM – It’s cool to see this as a possibility but it’s a chicken and egg problem and we don’t yet have either. So I’d see this best as a subcontract from Colorado.

  • MS – Yes, so this would be a person who is in the OMSF environment and has JW as an assigned trainer and advisor.

• JW will review+revise https://docs.google.com/document/d/1evKI5XscaZ6N3olBTv1r119hSF7fv4DxtZSTxMCvcdA/edit

• MS will send JW the subsequent forms and budget stuff to review+sign once it’s ready.