Guidelines for At-Large TAC Members - Cycle 1

This document provides a brief overview of the Virtual Review process for At-Large TAC members.



General Responsibilities

At-Large members are selected as members of the Executive Committee and participate as regular members in the review of the Large, Treasury and Legacy proposals discussed by that committee. They will be assigned as Primary and Secondary Reviewers to EC proposals and grade all proposals where no conflict exists.

At-Large members are not assigned to a particular topical panel. They participate in the topical panel reviews as observers, but they can also be asked to take over the role of chairing panels for discussion of individual proposals if both the Panel Chair and the Vice-Chair are conflicted. They do not vote on topical panel proposals.



Software and Hardware

The meetings will be run using BlueJeans. We encourage all panelists to show their videos to allow for face-to-face communication, but recognize this may not be possible in cases where panelists have limited bandwidth. To that end, we encourage panelists to use a wired or stable wireless internet connection, but again recognize that may not be possible in all cases.



Conflicts of Interest

Any panelist who is conflicted on a proposal for any reason must leave the virtual meeting for the duration of the discussion of that proposal (both in the individual proposal discussion phase and the ranking phase if the conflicted proposal is being compared to another). They cannot turn off audio and video but remain connected to the call, they must leave the meeting. Once the discussion is over, they can rejoin the meeting again, using the same link as before.

Ahead of the meeting, panelists should identify the best way to contact them to tell them that the discussion has ended and they can rejoin the meeting. Panelists should also be vigilant during that time and aware that they could be called back at any time. We have set up a Slack channel for each panel and strongly recommend using this, but other methods (email, text, WhatsApp) could be used instead if Slack does not prove to work well. Panelists should make sure that notifications are turned on and/or alert sounds are turned on, as appropriate, for the method they choose.



Proposal Comments

At-Large members are required to provide Proposal Feedback Comments for all proposals for which they are the Primary reviewer, in consultation with the Secondary reviewer – incorporating comments from other panelists and from the discussions.

We encourage the use of Slack to message the whole panel or individual panelists to assist in the writing of reviews.


Next: Guidelines for Panel Support Scientists




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Originally published