Based on comments from members who attended, the Open House was quite successful. Over 45 members participated in tours of NCAR's visualization lab, current chemistry labs and new chemistry building. They also viewed a range of demos of community tools developed by the UCAR Office of Programs (Unidata, COMET, COSMIC, DLESE, and NSDL). The poster session included displays by 25 UCAR programs that are now available for viewing online. The plenary session included many responses to Open House Challenge questions, including:

• Open House. Many members commented that the Open House gave them a good sense of what is going on at UCAR and suggested that the information be shared with all community members via a follow-up meeting website and possibly a visit from a UCAR staff member. It was also suggested that a CD or DVD explaining UCAR to faculty and students and presenting collaboration opportunities be developed.
• Advocacy. It was noted that this is a tough budget time for the UCAR community and a request was made for UCAR to increase advocacy efforts. For current efforts see the UCAR Office of Government Affairs website. There was a suggestion that the UCAR community develop a position on GEOSS and advocate for it.
• Digital Libraries. Many members commented on the benefits of the DLESE and NSDL digital libraries and the classroom and research benefits that members could get from these programs (Find these libraries on the UOP website.) These comments included some reports of how these digital libraries were helping in the hurricane-stricken gulf region. There was also concern expressed about whether NSF would continue to support these important efforts.
• Visualization. As a result of the Open House, one member will be using Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer in regional climate studies. Others talked about the need for less-expensive collaboration tools—something like the Access Grid, but cheaper.
• Large-scale Computing Tools. Several members would like to see summer graduate workshops on how to use large-scale computing tools.
• Modeling Tools. A member asked that UCAR help the community use various weather models because it is difficult to download certain models and assimilate the appropriate data into them. This might be a project for key people in UCAR (Unidata, SCD, MMM, etc).
• HIAPER. Members would like to see community suggestions for HIAPER instrumentation and to have UCAR gather together data assimilation tools for the community.
• Education and Training. It was suggested that the community needs more training tools on how to use satellite observations—maybe something like the COMET NESDIS satellite modules or workshops. There were also comments about community proposals on instrumentation and computing language training. A comment was made that the community needs a more systematic path to the many education products in the community and better survey courses using these products. There was also a request for faculty stipends to come to COMET to develop lecture and curriculum content that could be shared across the community as well as more COMET lecture-style webcasts to transfer new science to the universities. It was cited that the recent UCAR Community Survey had shown that faculty are using COMET modules themselves to extend their knowledge.