OMF Members Council Meeting 2025: general discussions

[cmbarton]

Welcome to the 2025 Open Modeling Foundation Members Council meetings in 2025. You can use this thread for discussions related to the meetings in 2025.

[alee]

set up evergreen outreach materials

• clearly outline OMF value proposition
• highlight working group outputs: standards, cyberinfrastructure / tools, early career scholars best practices
• good enough practices
• create a 'model primer' for policy makers, students, and the broader public: what is a model, what are their limitations, how should they be used, how can they be misused, what sources of bias exist (input data, model assumptions, parameters, etc.). similar to how you teach new students about modeling
• focus on transparency

think about impact pathways + incentive structures + example before / after OMF compliance that demonstrates value

perhaps set up an equivalent TRUST principles for models (see also Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure) and show how adopting OMF standards checks boxes in the TRUST principles for models

TRUST acronym for OMF models:

T – Transparent: Clear documentation of assumptions, data sources, and code to enable scrutiny and understanding.

R – Reproducible: Results can be independently verified using shared data and code.

U – User focused / Usable: Designed for accessibility and applicability by both domain experts and broader users.

S – Standards-based / standards-compliant / sustainable: Maintained with long-term preservation, versioning, and community stewardship.

T – Tested: Validated against real-world data and/or benchmarked for performance and correctness.

[hsu000001]

Last week I was wondering if any of the other council members had a good example of a glossary related to scientific models. It is something that we struggle with, the terminology across different disciplines. Is a glossary or some other resource like that an aspect of the Lingua Franca project, perhaps? Could a space be made on the OMF github to host one? I have some terms related to the modeling in my organization (in .md/.html - but difficult to post publicly), but a more crowdsourced list via OMF would be more helpful. Someone please tell me a community-sourced list already exists. @alee

[cmbarton]

Nice idea @hsu000001 We could do this kind of glossary in a couple ways. We could host a document in the OMF project on OSF. We could start by opening a dedicated GitHub discussion thread that people could add to, or open a GitHub issue. Your document could be served in any of these ways right now. We also discussed developing "OMF Model Briefs" to host. This could be one of those briefs.

[alee]

I'm not aware of a comprehensive glossary but we do have an education forum page that tries to collect relevant educational materials.

The intrepid ECS working group is working to establish an "awesome list" at https://github.com/openmodelingfoundation/awesome-modeling-practices but that's still under construction...

A collection of resources with a heavy bent on earth systems models (should we also include the Mississippi River Basin Model example as a fun example)

• From the DOE: https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsearth-system-and-climate-models
• https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/physicalgeologyh5p/chapter/16-4-computer-models-of-the-earth-system/
• https://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/teaching_materials/earth_modeling/index.html
• Leigh Tesfatsion et al's ABM for social scientist primer: https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/archive/tesfatsi/abmread.htm#ABMSocSci

We could probably get an LLM to crawl all of these and create a glossary 😓