User Representation Team Charter

Mission

The User Representation Team ensures that the needs of the Kepler user community are met in a timely fashion and that the Kepler user base grows at a steady rate. It provides direction to the other teams and working groups such that their efforts lead to wider adoption of Kepler and greater productivity of our current users.  It reaches out to emerging user communities and seeks to understand the needs that characterize each community.  This team takes responsibility for the production and review of outreach materials such as user documentation, web site content, and newsletters. 

Scope of activity

User Outreach

• Contact and engage new Kepler users and communities.
• Gather specific user needs from existing and emerging Kepler user communities.
• Identify particular scientists with representative needs for the solutions Kepler can provide in particular domains.
• Model features needed by users as well-defined requirements and use cases.
• Organize and run user outreach and training workshops.

Guiding Kepler Development

• Inform the other core teams what features end users of Kepler require, along with the features required by engineers supporting those users.
• Recommend development priorities to the other teams and working groups.
• Plot out the overall feature development roadmap for Kepler from a user-requirements point of view.
• Monitor development plans and work performed by other teams and working groups, and include this information as part of the development roadmap.
• Evaluate how well the Kepler architecture and development infrastructure support the diverse uses and deployment contexts required by users.

Supporting Users

• Develop comprehensive documentation for Kepler end users.
• Organize, develop content for, and maintain key portions of the Kepler web site, and provide a web-based framework for hosting content contributed by users and developers.
• Maintain and monitor user collaboration tools such as e-mail lists, discussion forums, and wikis provided to users.
• Mine mailing lists and forums for implied user requirements, feature requests, and bug reports.
• Route questions posed on kepler development and user mailing lists to appropriate persons  when questions relate to end-user features and others do not respond immediately or authoritatively.

 Team organization

• This team is organized around a number of members with ongoing responsibilities in different focus areas. 
  
• The team uses project charters to describe the development of new systems to be used either by team members to carry out their tasks (e.g. a new requirements modeling approach) or directly by users (e.g. the development of a new wiki site for Kepler users). 
  
• Ongoing activities employing well-established systems are not chartered as projects but rather are described in amendments to this team charter. 
  
• Membership may be expanded by nominating candidates to the team leader(s) who then approve or reject the nominations.