A Task Force was established in 2013 to examine just this issue. Please read their report before proceeding further! Report of the APS Task Force to Re‐envision the April Meeting

Dmitri, Prisca, and Bob met with Patti McBride who served on the Task Force in order to understand the background to the findings and what the APS reaction was to the Task Force recommendations. A summary of our discussion can be found here: Summary of our discussion with Patti

• (name) go ahead and put comments here…
• (Jodi) I don't think moving the meeting to Washington is a good idea. It would be cost prohibitive, unless done in January and then congress and their staffers are on break which would defeat the purpose of organizing or engaging in lobbing and/or congressional visits.

• (Sheldon) Keep date fixed and also the location
• (Sheldon) too many other conferences in spring e.g. Moriond, etc.

• (Prisca) This has been suggested, but I think it will be both confusing as well as continuing the downward spiral of attendance. We should be encouraging attendance every year and emphasizing complementary aspects.

• The massively parallel agenda discourages some of what we are trying to do.
  • (Sheldon) Have contacts in the relevant experiments generate interest by scheduling many >20 min invited talks. Try and make these talks general covering several experiments.
  • (Sheldon) Registration cost is too high (is this connected to the venue?)
  • (Matthew) perhaps also anathema! Discourage collaborations from sending 15 students to give separate talks on teeny-tiny aspects of large experiment (my own did this: LZ/LUX) and instead encourage 1 talk by senior graduate student or postdoc or even faculty (invited?)? This would address massively parallel problem, because perhaps would end sessions that are the same people talking to each other.
• Can we promote better and more poster sessions? Food! Possibly special registration rates? Incentives?
• Reject abstracts (is this anathema?) - have a quota and the rest go to posters.
• Encourage specific fields that have NOT been sending representatives
  • Please write down which fields are under-represented at the April meeting here.

• Designate a DPF program committee member to be in charge of this
• Provide a forum for undergraduate talks. Find a forum organizer from one of the teaching universities.
• SPS provides funding for travel. Provide better linkage to SPS via DPF website or other.
• If we really want undergraduate attendance we shouldn't be having APS during the academic year (Matthew)

• Need point person to look into this for Denver
• There are existing forums and panels - connect DPF to APS, don't reinvent the wheel.
• Are there DPF-specific programs we could do? I envision a cocktail party for networking in HEP

• Feature talks across divisions. More combined sessions.
  • (Prisca) Can we do this really early? Maybe Young Kee and I need to talk to DAP and DNP about combining sorting categories from the start? Or maybe we all just get our abstracts and then consider combining sessions by combining abstracts right from the beginning?
  • (Matthew) lots of confusion currently, where for example my collaborators on LUX/LZ send some abstracts to DPF, others to DAP or DNP even.
• Publicize and encourage attendance at the “other” sessions (outreach, climate, public policy, history)
  • Can we come up with practical strategies for that?
  • Coordinate with the other forums or provide our own twist.
• Use the APS Media that already exists to publicize our sessions.

• (Sheldon) Have a regular NSF/DOE update and present status
• (Prisca) Coordinate this with SNOWMASS planning (at business meeting ?
• Mental Health issues and Work-Family balance (mostly directed to young researchers)
• Forming healthy and efficient large collaborations (Matthew)
• Connections to the on-going Congressional Visits by FNAL and SLAC and others. Possibly tutorials in approaching senators - might already exist in general - we could have a HEP specific session after the more general APS one.

• Pick a member of the Program Committee to be in charge of outreach - they can work with newest DPF outreach coordinator
• Start Denver 2019 work right away
• Involve local institutions (e.g. Science Museum, Universities, technical colleges, High Schools, QuarkNet.
• Learn from the Plasma Physics people http://www.apsdpp.org/outreach.php
• Link to the overall theme of the meeting. e.g. Screening Interstellar this April with Kip Thorne - since the theme is LIGO and the Nobel Prize.

Schedules of the new April Meeting format are to be found at dpf:drafts of a New April meeting session style The Discussion on April 16 centered on the last slide of the presentation.

(a) Providing a forum for undergraduate talks specific to DPF. The forum could be led by someone in one of the teaching universities. SPS does provide some travel funds

(b) Mentoring and career building advice for graduate students and young researchers is very important and we should strengthen this with forums and panels.

© Better connections by DPF to existing APS programs (Prisca) science policy, climate, politics, outreach, grad mentoring, undergrads. Examine important social issues e.g. mental health issues , diversity, bullying

(d) Capitalize on the broad representation across many divisions by better coordination on joint sessions. Need to coordinate special sessions (last minute forums like Foster or Restrospectives) , so we don’t take away from invited sessions and prize sessions.

(e) Updates from the Funding Agencies. PI meetings. Tie meetings to the Snowmass process (Young-Kee Kim)

(f) Liven up the massively parallel agenda. (Young-Kee Kim). Each student talk ALSO has a poster, Panel discussions instead of talks Thesis Slam sessions, reduce number of DPF Invited sessions, replace with symposia.

(g) Better connection to the locale – resources and public outreach (Prisca Cushman, Bertrand Echenard, Bob Bernstein)

* Other categories?