Communications and Collaborative Tools

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The Mu2e Collaboration uses a variety of resources for communication within the collaboration, institutional memory and communication to the outside world. Those resources are described here:

The Mu2e Document Database

This is the core of Mu2e's institutional memory, containing talks, internal notes, policies, planning documents, project management documents and the working drafts of papers. It hosts the agendae for most Mu2e meetings. And it contains copies of selected external documents to ensure that we have a reliable reference copy.

The Mu2e Web Site

  • The main Mu2e public presence on the internet is: https://mu2e.fnal.gov.
  • There is also content restricted to those working on Mu2e: https://mu2e.fnal.gov/atwork/.
    • The restricted pages are accessed using your SSO credentials.
  • The internal part of the web site is main web presence of the Mu2e Construction Project and many of the subsystems.
  • Tools for monitoring data processing and data quality are accessed via the web site; many more of these will be developed as we approach data taking.
  • Most of the computing and simulation related content has been moved off the web site and is now on the Mu2e Wiki.
  • We anticipate that the organization of physics work will be on the Mu2e Wiki, not on the web site.

Wikis

The Mu2e wiki was created long after the Mu2e web site. The collaboration has decided that some mature content will always remain on the web site and that most new content will be created on the wiki. All of the computing and software documentation is on the wiki.

Mu2e has two wikis, one for public content and one restricted to people working on Mu2e

For political reasons it was not possible to have one wiki with access controlled per page.

Tips on using the wiki effectively and examples of how to use certain features are collected at WikiTips.

The full content of the public site is accessible to anyone with the url, on site or off. Editing the public site is restricted to Mu2e members; to edit the site you need to login using the button in the upper right corner. The front page of the internal site is accessible to anyone with the url, on site or off. To see beyond the front page of the internal site, you need to log in to that site. You need to login separately to each site.

The Mu2e-II project has it's own public and internal wikis:

These sites have the same access rules as the Mu2e wiki sites. The only difference is that the authorization list is maintained separately. To be added to the list, contact the Mu2e-II leadership.

Slack

There is Mu2e Slack workspace. For details see our Slack wiki page.

Hypernews

Hypernews (hnews) is an 1990's era discussion forum technology. It was used extensively by Mu2e from September 2015 to July 2024, when it was turned off because of technical issues that the Fermilab did not have the resources to address.

The content of the site has been preserved and Mu2e is evaluating options for making the archival content web viewable and searchable. As of July 2024, this is not yet available.

Most discussion forums previously hosted on hypernews are now hosted in the Mu2e Slack workspace.

Some working groups still use the #Listserv_Mailing_Lists lists for annoucements. When you join a working group, check which they use and subscribe yourself to their list or slack channel.

Listserv Mailing Lists

Mu2e uses the Fermilab listerv system to distribute announcements to mailing lists. The main Mu2e mailing list, to which all general announcements are sent, is a listserv list.

When you join Mu2e you are often, but not always added to this list. To check if you are on this list: 

Send an email to listerv@fnal.gov
Leave the subject empty
Write on one line: review mu2emailing

You will get two replies from the listserv. One of them has the subject line "Re: REVIEW MU2EMAILING"; if it says that you are not authorized to review the list, then you are not on the list. To subscribe 

 Send an email to listerv@fnal.gov
 Leave the subject empty
 Write on one line: subscribe mu2emailing firstname lastname

One of the spokespersons will see this email and add you to the list. Once you are subscribed to a list, you may also post to that list, but only using email address from which you subscribed.

If you are not a Fermilab employee, please do not use your username@fnal.gov address in this list. In that past that was acceptable, even recommended, but it is no longer guaranteed to work. If happens to work for you today, it might now work tomorrow. So please use your email at your home institution or another preferred email address, such as gmail.

For more information see:

Some of the Mu2e working groups use listserv lists for annoucements. Others use the Mu2e #Slack workspace. When you join a working group, check which they use and subscribe yourself to their list or forum.

Zoom

Mu2e uses Zoom to host our meetings. Fermilab requires us to following their policies on Zoom security. See Zoom#Recommendations_for_Zoom_Security.

To participate in a zoom meeting hosted by someone else you do not need a zoom account. You do need a zoom account to host a meeting. If you do not have a zoom account and you need one, first ask to get one through your home institution. If that does not work, you can request a Fermilab zoom account but you may only use it for Fermilab related activity; to ask for an account, open a ServiceDesk ticket.

Electronic Collaboration Logbook (ECL)

The Electronic Collaboration Logbook is used for logging activities and events thoughout Mu2e construction, installation, commissioning, operation, etc. 

 https://dbweb0.fnal.gov/ECL/mu2e

There is a link on that page to request an account; you must request that your username be your SSO username (same as your kerberos principal). When you authenticate, use your SSO password.

Check with the working groups your join to learn if you need to request an account on the ECL.

Indico

Indico is open source software for creating meeting agendae and archiving documents associated with those meetings, https://getindico.io . The agendae for most Mu2e meetings are created using the Mu2e DocDB, which has similar features. For many other meetings, particularly externally organized reviews, the agendae are created using Fermilab indico instance: https://indico.fnal.gov . In such cases you will be given the url of the meeting. Some content on the indico site is protected. If the event that you are viewing is protected, you will be prompted to log in. There are several ways to login; look for the link to use your Fermilab SSO credentials. In some cases individual events are protected by a separate password; if you are invited to attend such a meeting, you will be told the password. You may to authenticate with both your SSO credentials and the password.

CERN also has an indico site: https://indico.cern.ch and you may sometimes be invited to meeting hosted on that site. SLAC also has an indico site: https://indico.slac.stanford.edu/ .

Glossary and Acronym Dictionaries

There are several glossaries that explain terms and acronyms used within Mu2e:

Both of these pages contain links to additional acronym dictionariaries.

Social Media

Social media sites with a Mu2e presence include:

Contact Young Mu2e if you would like to contribute.

Email Forwarding

You have a Fermilab email address: username@fnal.gov, where username is your kerberos principal. For Fermilab employees, this is a real email address with an Exchange Server mailbox. For most Fermilab Users and Affiliates, this address is configured to forward to the email address that you used when you applied for your Fermilab ID. Some tools in the lab computing infrastructure send announcements to your fnal.gov email address. So it's important that you continue to monitor that email address. If you no longer have access to the email address that you used when you applied for your Fermilab ID, open a ServiceDesk ticket to request that your forwarding be redirected to your new preferred email address.

In the past it was common practice to use your fnal.gov email address for such things as:

  • Your email address in listserv lists
  • Your email address in hypernews
  • Your email address in slack
  • Your email address in GitHUb

And it was common practice to send email to a colleague by using their fnal.gov email address.

All of the above mostly still works but it is failing in more and more cases. We now recommend that you do NONE of the above. Instead, use your home institution or other preferred email address (eg gmail) for listserv, hypernews, slack and GitHub. And contact your colleagues by sending email directly to their preferred email address, whether their home institution or a third party such as gmail. It is still OK to send email to Fermilab employees using their fnal.gov email address.

If you need to find a colleague's email address there are 3 places to look:

In practice most of the old ways of doing things still works. But it cannot be guaranteed to work in the future.

The reason for this recommendation is the introduction of an email security protocol called DMARC that guarantees a trust chain between sender and recipient of email. Depending on many details about configuration of email at the sending site and the receiving site, forwarding may break the trust chain and the receiving site will refuse to deliver the email. The DOE requires all of the national labs to use DMARC and it is becoming widely adopted outside of DOE.

Public Documents

If you have a Mu2e document that is intended to be publicly available, such as a conference paper or slides shown at a conference, you have several options:

  • For conference documents the conference web site will serve as the public archival copy.
  • If the document is preprint or a conference paper you can submit it to arXiv.org: https://arxiv.org/
  • Published documents will be viewable from the publishers website
  • Fermilab Technical Publications: https://lss.fnal.gov/
  • The Fermilab Public DocDB instance, which is discussed in the next section.

All public documents should have a Fermilab Preprint Number, see Mu2e-doc-4083.

In all cases there should be a copy in the Mu2e DocDB and the notes section of the metadata should have a link to the public copy. All of the above are indexed by INSPIRE so people who look up your publication record will find it.

If you have questions about which you should use, contact the Mu2e Publications Board.


Fermilab Public DocDB

Prior to summer 2020 the Mu2e DocDB held many documents that were readable by the general public, such as slides shown at conference talks or colloquia. Starting in the summer of 2020 Fermilab changed its security policy and most DocDB instances at Fermilab are no longer allowed to have documents that are publicly readable. This includes the Mu2e DocDB.

At that time the lab created a new DocDB instance, the Fermilab Public DocDB, that holds only documents that may be viewed by the public: 

 https://publicdocs.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/DocumentDatabase

Mu2e has not made much use of this DocDB instance; most of our public documents are either available from other sources or are out-of-date. Other sources include arXiv.org or publishers' urls, which can be found via INSPIRE. One important Mu2e document can be found in this DocDB instance, the Mu2e Data Management Plan, that must be cited in many grant applications, 

https://publicdocs.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/ShowDocument?docid=515

The guidelines for adding a new document to the Fermilab Public DocDB are available at: 

 https://fermi.servicenowservices.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0014035#instructions
 (to see this article you must first log into the service desk and then click on the link)

The documents in the Mu2e DocDB that were formerly public are still there; they now belong to a group named "waspublic". This group is configured so that any they can be read by any member of Mu2e but not by the public.

INSPIRE and ORCID

INSPIRE is an an organization that curates information about publications in High Energy Physics. You can use INSPIRE to view the citation history of a paper or to view the publication history of a member of the field, including yourself. An ORCID is a researcher identifier that is used by INSPIRE. Mu2e management requests that all Mu2e members have an ORCID. For more details see https://mu2e.fnal.gov/atwork/workgroups/PublicationsBoard/orcid.shtml . When we submit physics papers, INSPIRE asks us to send them a list of the ORCIDs of all authors so we need to have a complete list.

To get a list of Mu2e publications from INSPIRE: https://inspirehep.net/literature?sort=mostrecent&size=25&page=1&q=collaboration%3AMu2e

Other

Fixme: also discuss:

  • Teamcenter
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