Minutes of the Steering Committee meeting of the 15th of december 2020 (via zoom)

Presents: All the representatives + Nicolas Leclerq (future ESRF SC member)

Tango collaboration contract renewal 

The Tango Controls collaboration contract signed between all the partners had been signed in 2016 for 5 years. Therefore it arrives at termination the 31st of december 2020. Before signing it for the 5 next years, the following amendments were proposed:

  • Fees: It has been decided to increase the fees to 11000€ to compensate for inflation over the 5 last year. The fees will stay fixed for the duration of the contract i.e. 5 years
  • Core members must engage at least 6 month of manpower in developments of common interest for the community in addition to the initial fees. Each core member will produce a report at the end of the year of their activities.
  • Role of coordinator: it was agreed to rotate the role of coordinator amongst the partners every 6 months instead of financing a position to do this. Each partner will coordinate the activites of the collaboration. This includes organising at least one meeting of the SC and a meeting (virtual or physical) of the community. The ESRF offered to start of the role of coordinator. The other members will take up the remaining periods.
  • SC meetings: it was agreed to increase the frequency of the SC meetings to at least 2 a year organised by the member who has the role of coordinator.
  • The new contract will be prepared by the ESRF lawyer and distributed to all member for signing by their respective management.  Some members warned that such a contract may take up to 6 months to be validated and signed.

Migration of official source code repository

Following the changes to Travis.org and also to be more inline with the other Tango projects tt has been agreed to move the official repository of all the Tango components from GitHub (https://github.com/tango-controls/) to GitLab (https://gitlab.com/tango-controls) . This move has been made possible by the acceptance of Tango Controls as an OSS project on GitLab with free Gold status for at least the first year. The move to gitlab will open the possibility of self-hosting in the future if necessary.

Multi annual contract with commercial partners

The ESRF presented the project of a multi-annual frame contract which is in preparation at ESRF as a Call For Tender (CFT). The new contract will ensure better compliance the purchasing rules at the ESRF and help secure suppliers for the medium to long term. The CFT will be announced in January 2021. It depends on signing the collaboration contract as soon as possible..

The CFT will specify a set of competences and ask companies to apply as supplier of one or several competences.  The consortium will select 3 or 4 companies to cover all the competences and sign a price agreement for 3 years with the possibility of renewing for 2 extra years.